Re: Save a few hunderd kilobytes or a few hundred perl users?

[Johnny Lam]

On Wed, May 01, 2002 at 04:22:44AM +0100, Hugo van der Sanden wrote:
> 
> There are some problems to be overcome, not least the social ones
> ("my ISP won't install CPAN packages"), but it may be possible to
> overcome some of them by providing installations targeted at
> particular domains - 'perl for booting', 'perl for ISPs' etc -
> with the same imprimatur as Perl itself. I hope to see some
> progress made on this in the 5.10 cycle.

The "my ISP won't install CPAN packages" problem would be solved by my
proposal of having separate perl-5.10.0 and perl-library-1.0
distributions because *both* would be recommended to be installed by
the Perl community, and the world-at-large would learn that they
really need to install both to match the functionality of previous
releases of perl.  My proposal also makes it easy to create the
targetted Perl installations that you're suggesting:

perl-5.10.0
perl-library-standard-1.0
perl-library-ISP-1.0
perl-library-bioinformatics-1.0
perl-library-sysadmin-1.0
...

A user would install perl-5.10.0 then choose the Perl module library
most relevant to his/her domain of interest.  They could each have
individual release cycles, and the responsibility for the domain-
specific Perl libraries could be delegated to the groups that have the
most experience within those domains.

Cheers,

-- Johnny Lam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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Re: Save a few hunderd kilobytes or a few hundred perl users?

[Johnny Lam]

On Wed, May 01, 2002 at 04:55:25AM +0900, Dan Kogai wrote:
> 
> Maybe python and ruby should go for that approach as well and I see 
> that's the way to go -- for ports.  We still need perl to build FreeBSD 
> and we got to come up with a correct soultion -- not only politically 
> but also technically.  Your current soultion is, to say the least yet 
> with all due respect, incorrect in both criteria.

For the benefit of the FreeBSD users, I will reiterate a point I made on
a different thread:

I think Perl should be broken into two pieces: a "miniperl" distribution
that is called "Perl" and a separate "Standard Perl Module Library"
distribution.  They would be versioned separately so what's considered part
of the core Perl language isn't confused with what version of CGI.pm or
other random module is included with a Perl distribution.  It's clear that
the modules evolve much faster than Perl's release cycle, so the Perl
Library distribution could simply be on its release cycle.

NetBSD (I) used to separate out Perl into a separate "miniperl" package +
extensions, but I gave up on doing this because it was just getting to be
a maintainence headache -- with every Perl release, I had to wade through
a different module list to see what should be removed and what should stay
and I just got fed up with the extra work.  This is a lose for some of our
platforms that just don't have a lot of disk space to spare, e.g.
NetBSD/hpcmips.  With a Perl + Perl Library setup, we could more easily
control via a package system which modules are installed in a simpler,
more additive way.

Cheers,

-- Johnny Lam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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