Guido van Rossum wrote: > Leaving aside the Perl vs. Py thing, opinions on CPAN seem to be > diverse -- yes, I've heard people say that this is something that > Python sorely lacks; but I've also heard from more than one person > that CPAN sucks from a quality perspective. So I think we shouldn't > focus on emulating CPAN; rather, we should solve the problems we > actually have. I note that CPAN originated in an age before the web > was mature.
My personal problems with CPAN were always of the kind that it recorded too many/too stringent dependencies. I used it over a period of several years on Solaris, roughly two times a year. Each time, the package I wanted to installed depended on another package, this in turn on a third, and some of these eventually on a Perl version more recent than the one I had installed. So CPAN would always *first* install a new version of Perl for me. Sometimes, this would fail, because Perl wouldn't pass its test suite on Solaris. So I did huge downloads, long compilation times, and still didn't get the package installed. I always fixed it by installing the new Perl version manually, and then starting over with CPAN again. I'm not exactly sure why that happened, but I think there are two causes: - when installing a package, the automated download tool should not try to find the most recent version. Instead, it should try to find a version that causes the least amount of changes to my system. - CPAN shouldn't include Perl proper (likewise, the Cheesehop shouldn't include Python proper). If dependencies can't be resolved with the current version, but could be resolved with a later version, the download tool should give up and explain it all. Regards, Martin _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
