[sf-perl] Moose, mouse, cpanm long story

[Joseph Brenner]

 yary <not.com at gmail.com> wrote:

> The time saved from writing and re-writing bits of setup and checking
> code made up the learning curve within the first week. Its constraint
> checking found some errors quickly that would have had me sprinkling
> printfs or using the debugger otherwise.

I haven't had that experience yet... I'm still a little skeptical
about the constant type checking everywhere.  But then, I like the
data validation features of relational databases, so this could just
be one of my little hypocrisies.

(Wouldn't it be nice to be be able to flip-off the type checking when
in production?  But that's such an obvious idea, some one must have
done something like that already.)

> [...] also it needs to be
> installed on machines behind strict firewalls where we don't have many
> privileges. In fact at the time the project started, I couldn't even
> be sure what version of perl was on the target host or if it had any
> compiler tools available.

I have a theory that a lot of the gods of perl don't quite grasp the
locked-down conditions a lot of us have to make do with.  These days
their answer to everything is "let them eat cpan", but it's not always
that simple.

> Now, I had heard of cpanm ("cpan-minus") many times, and was a cpanm
> skeptic. I have always had success installing modules with the cpan or
> cpanp ("cpan-plus") clients. But then, that was mostly on my own
> machines, and here I was in a situation where I could not install the
> Mouse I needed, not from pure source nor from cpan, and had no time to
> fiddle with settings. I scp'd the standalone "cpanm" perl program,
> pointed it at the Mouse working directory cpan had started- and cpanm
> built it, compiling the C backend, on the first try. So now I'm a
> convert... though I will save it for the sticky cases.

Pretty much the same with me.  I can deal with getting CPAN.pm or
CPANPLUS.pm set-up, so what's the big deal with cpan-minus?  But when
you don't own the box, and you're in a hurry to get something working,
cpanm comes to the rescue.

By the way, one thing I think we have to thank cpan-minus for is that
I think it shamed the CPAN.pm maintainers into making the setup more
automagical.  The last time I did it, it seemed a lot eaisier.

> pps. Sorry [not] to join in the Moose-ish conversations late. It seems there no
>  $time !~ /work|home/

Yes, I've been feeling the same.  I'm the one who got a lot of it
started, but my replies have been sketchy at best.

(It doesn't help that I gave that lightning talk about "rep.el".  Now
I'm trying to get Emacs::Rep version 0.8 working right... emacs data
structures *still* strike me as a horrible pain to work with.)