From: Matt Lawrence <matt@...>
Date: 2003-02-13T08:34:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Can we attack the 'not enough libraries' thing straight on?

On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Hal E. Fulton wrote:

> Over the (very long) lifetime of that discussion -- not just
> its latest incarnation -- there hasn't been much of that.
> 90% of what I've heard about CPAN is positive. I don't know
> from my own experience, as I'm not a real Perler.

Well, I'm saying negative things.  CPAN (the Module) has given me too many 
problems over the last year or so.  It seems to work equally badly on all 
platforms.  I hope I'll never have to deal with it again.
 
> I gather then that you come down heavily in favor of
> the "universal smart installer."
> 
> I'd love to see a standard emerge and then become
> universally used. Right now we have raainstall and
> rpkg, neither of which I'm familiar with. As far as
> I know, these are nowhere near universal nor are
> they compatible with each other. There are probably
> others also.

I don't quite agree.  I really don't want another package manager for Ruby
add-ons that doesn't play nicely with the package manager for the system.  
I've spent too many years doing sys admin in large data centers and have 
seen too many problems when each box is configured by hand.  I'd really 
like to see .rpm, .deb, etc. packages generated.

I know it's an unpopular view, but I'm sticking to it.

-- Matt