From: Sam Roberts <sroberts@...>
Date: 2003-04-09T12:22:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Call for standardised package installation procedure

> > wrong, though.  Is there are precedent?  Some Perlers love the CPAN
> > shell, others hate it, but does anyone use apt-get to install their
> > Perl modules?

I do.

This isn't an either/or thing. When you have a working os pkg manager,
that's what you want to use. I installed almost all of me debian
perl modules using dselect, its dead-easy if you know how to use
dselect, and I do, I need to in order to run debian. I've also installed
a lot of the ruby libraries using dselect.

But, that doesn't mean you don't need a more agnostic way to do things
as well. There aren't dpkgs for everything, so I've used cpan, as well.
And somebody just starting to use debian would likely hate the
interface, and if they knew the perl install shell, would be way happier
with that. Me, I hated it, and it screwed up multiple times while
I was trying to choose the download src. Awful, but I'm sure an
experienced perlist would have had not trouble at all.


So, Id say Ruby needs a generic way familiar to rubyists that works everywhere.

If there was a way to use it to generate system-specific installers,
that would be cool, its a nice idea.

But... aside from debian's dpkg system, I'm not aware of any that
resolve dependencies, so what are the other targets?

Sam