[Chicago-talk] "I don't have permission to installamoduleonthesystem!"'

[Steven Lembark]

> I'm no Marlon Perkins, but sysadmins are generally paranoid, slow-moving
> creatures.

Gee, thanks. I'm sure you'd prefer someone who quickly
installs broken lib's and has the machine down for a week
re-installing and recovering the user space. Every SysAdmin
has been bit by something like this at least once, told to
suck off by vendor support, and deciced that nothing ever
gets changed again. Period. The honest, forgiving care we
get from users while the restore is going on is another
inducement to treat the vendor distro as frozen in time.

The hard part is learning enough about how the packages work
to allow people installing enough of it for local use without
risking the overall stability. That requires that most rare
of lubricants: elbow grease. Even worse, you have to grease
your brain cells to make it all useful. Unless they're really
into reading Nemeth and friends cover-to-cover most SA's will
never know how to customize a system and the vendor support
will never tell them.

> Does Parrot have a more quasi-CLASSPATH environment variable? It would be
> nice to have the "automagically find my modules" module(s) as part of the
> standard distribution.

FindBin::libs. It's on CPAN, feel free to suggest that it
be made part of the standard distribution (Graham's FindBin
is already).

In the meantime, get your admins to install it off of CPAN
and you'll never need to pollute their holy lib's again.


--
Steven Lembark                               2930 W. Palmer
Workhorse Computing                       Chicago, IL 60647
                                            +1 888 359 3508