From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2002-11-08T17:51:22+09:00
Subject: Re: CPAN Style installer

In article <Pine.LNX.4.44.0211071926160.7998-100000@localhost.localdomain>,
Tom Clarke  <tom@u2i.com> wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I had a number of conversations at RubyConf (you know who you are :-)) on 
>the subject of a CPAN style installer for ruby. Being someone who is 
>happier with code than talk, I decided to code something up.
>
>Here it is:
>http://osdn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/narf-lib/raa-install-0.0.2.tgz
>The project page is shared with narf at:
>http://sourceforge.net/projects/narf-lib/

Cool.  I hope to get time to play with this tomorrow.

>
>Its more a demo or a proof of concept (though the sort with lots of 
>Unit tests) and as such has not been tested on anything other than my 
>platform (which is RedHat) and has some dependencies that would be 
>undesirable in a final version (wget and gnu tar spring to mind). It may 
>well not work on your platform (yet).
>

I believe there is a pure ruby implementation of tar in rpkg (?)

>It has a few useful attributes though:
>	* It uses the RAA as a database (via the raa-xml.xml file)
>	* It will install packages that use some of the common ruby setup 
>methods (setup.rb, install.rb, extconf.rb and configure)
>	* It supports dependency tracking and versioning without needing a 
>local database. (to work, this will require additional info in the RAA, 
>and version info in the ruby libraries)
>	* Little change is needed from developers 
>
>As such, it successfully installs quite a large percentage of packages in 
>the RAA (particularly those where the download isn't a 404). Some usage 
>examples:
>	bash$ raa-install --install strscan
>	bash$ raa-install --install Test::Unit
>	bash$ raa-install --showallpackages
> 
>One important thing, to fully implement this solution would require 
>additional data in the RAA as described below - the specifics of which I'm 
>more than happy to change. I think that building on top of the RAA is 
>definitely preferable to setting up something new though.
>
>If there is interest in me doing so I would be happy to get this into a 
>more generally usable state (particularly with regard to platform 
>support) and would be extremely happy with any contributions and even 
>better, offers to take the project off of my hands :-). 
>
>Competing projects are also welcome to make this project redundant as 
>long as it happens before I grow old.
>
>Enjoy,
>
>-Tom Clarke
>
>
>Some additional notes:
>
>Support for parsing the xml from the RAA is crude. I first experimented 
>with REXML for parsing the data, but I lost patience before it completed a 
>single parse - having libxml as a dependency didn't seem like a good idea 
>so I implemeted a crude RegEx based parser that would be sensitive to 
>changes in format.
>

I thought REXML was implemented in pure Ruby?  Why the dependence on 
libxml?

Thanks for the good work... now if we can only get mirroring... I believe 
someone will be posting something about that soon ;-)

Phil