From: Dan Sugalski <dan@...>
Date: 2002-01-07T14:20:06+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:30438] Re: snippet exchange (was: Re:  Re:     chomp for arrays?)

At 01:37 PM 1/7/2002 +0900, Jack Dempsey wrote:
>The way i was thinking of this working would be this: someone has heard of a
>good library to use but doesn't want to spend the time finding it
>downloading etc...this little function will do it...basically, automate the
>process of finding, downloading and using...

If you want the equivalent of perl's CPAN module (that connects to the CPAN 
archive, fetches module source, builds, tests, and then installs it) that 
essentially gives you an automated way to skip the hand-installs, by all 
means, go for it. It's a terribly useful thing. (Though one that I don't 
use on production machines either, unless it's pointing at a local CPAN 
mirror I've set up and vetted out)

That's not the same thing as this, though. This fires off the install when 
the program that needs the code wants. It potentially downloads code at 
irregular and uncontrolled intervals (you don't want random programs 
installing modules in your main library as that's really unsafe) as caches 
are filled, cleared, and reloaded (because you don't want to dedicate an 
unlimited amount of space to code fetched from the net because you can't be 
sure that, say, an archive won't get corrupt and expand out hugely and blow 
your partition)

>not very ambitious,and it would
>definitely need to be well thought out, but i think the idea could be useful
>in the end...perhaps a function that searches for a module and downloads it
>but doens't require it at the same time...whatever it is, this discussion
>can only help...

Hopefully some safeguards will get put in place if it gets implemented, and 
appropriate warnings in the docs as well. (I'd also not allow it with a 
safe mode past 0, for obvious reasons) Automated code fetching adds a 
larger set of risks than most people think.

					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk