On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, Rasputin wrote:

> Luke A. Kanies wrote:
> > We've discussed a parallel to perldoc, but what about CPAN?  I know that
> > we have RAA, but CPAN's recursive auto-installer is one of the really big
> > reasons so many non-programmers can use perl-based software.  People are
> > much less likely to reinvent the wheel if it's easy for them to explore
> > existing wheels, and people are much more likely to use your ruby-based
> > software if they just have to type 'cpan install <library>' and know it
> > will download, compile, and install everything.
>
> In my experience it always tries to update Perl itself, which is a bit
> cheeky if you just wanted HTML-Parser...

There was a bug in the version of CPAN shipped with 5.6.0, I believe,
which caused this.  It's long since fixed, and I think it was only one
subrelease of CPAN.

> Its better than what we have, but as I've said before, there are better
> models than CPAN to emulate (BSD ports/package tree and Debian apt-get
> spring to mind).

Frankly, it doesn't matter to me which one, as long as there's something.
I'm already starting to feel like a crack addict without a pipe or
lighter.  I wrote a small amount in perl yesterday for the first time in
about a month, and it was, um, horrible.  I left out all the semicolons
and parens and dollar signs, just like in ruby, and it didn't work.  :(
Unfortunately, perl has a very mature selection of modules which I've come
to depend on, with Net::LDAP being at the top of the list for me (I'm a
sysadmin, and I store lotsa stuff in LDAP), because it's all perl and
includes SSL support.  I expect as I use ruby more I'll delve into helping
out on the ldap module.

So my basic point is, I definitely don't want to go back to using perl
(wow, that was fast) but there are definitely some things I miss about it,
and I'd like to do what I can to support bringing those features to ruby,
especially if ruby doesn't replicate perl's mistakes.

Luke

-- 
The death rate on Earth is: .... (computing) .... One per person.