[sf-perl] "Why you should create CPAN distros"

[Joe Brenner]

Rich Morin <rdm at cfcl.com> wrote:

> This seems a bit like a motherhood and apple pie question, but
> the devil is in the details.

Well, I think Jeffrey's focus here is that he wants to argue
that *all* of your perl development should be done in the
form of cpan distros whether or not you intend on publishing
them on CPAN.

> Like, what distros should folks create, how to integrate
> with existing distros, etc.

Sure.

The kind of scheme under discussion (I would guess) is:

  (a) develop modules as cpan distros
  (b) automatically convert them into native OS packages
      (e.g. *.deb or *.rpm)
  (c) use your OS's package management (apt, yum, etc)
      to sort out dependencies during installation
  (d) update your servers using the OS package manager.

(Actually, I just double-checked the talk summary, and it
looks like Jeffrey may favor just using CPAN.pm to do
installation, without getting into the OS package management
level...).

Anyway, I can see how this sort of approach could be a good
way to go... but I would guess that a good distributed
version control system would fit the bill fairly well also.

> More generally, I am quite interested in the question of how to
> index and document all sorts of open source software, including
> the CPAN, Ruby Gems, and far more.  Might anyone be interested
> in a sub-session on what we'd like to see in infrastructure for
> this sort of thing and how we might try to get there?

This sounds like an interesting topic to me... I *think* it's
a different topic though.