2012Q2: Grant Proposal: Easy installation of non-CPAN dependencies

Category: Grants

Comments (5)


This seems fairly useful. I'd like to hear from people working on the Perl module toolchain to see if this fits their vision of how this sort of thing should work.


I can only reiterate what Dave said. Seems interesting and useful.


This seems useful, and see also Devel::CheckLib. A nice-to-have would be a way of installing by a non-root user, presumably by downloading and building C source. This would, conveniently, also let you support every other platform.


Why not use PackageKit instead of getting into the messy details of apt/yum/emerge/etc?

If you look at the "What software uses the PackageKit session API?" section of their website, you see that it's regularly used for installing missing dependencies in a distro-agnostic way.

(http://www.packagekit.org/pk-users.html)


@Rolsky: I have great respect for Chornii's many contributions, but as a toolchain person, I'm concerned that the proposed project -- while well intentioned -- is very narrow. It is Linux only. It seems unnecessarily tied to Module::Install and bundling instead of using configure_requires (supported in core Perl since Perl v5.10.1).

It also only benefits those distributions which are written/revised to use the CPAN::nom shim. I'd be more interested in a general solution that could be used as a common tool by CPAN clients, complemented by improvements in MYMETA to output library prerequisites. That would allow *any* external-library-using module to benefit (provided a user upgrades their CPAN client -- a classic tradefoff).

Overall, I'm neutral. More innovation along these lines would be great, but this isn't the way I'd go about it.


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