Re^2: Packaging Perl Programs (is) Painful

[marinersk]

why are you using Windows?

Because that's the system they give me to work on, and because, unlike you, I'm not man enough to bring something else in on my own expense, muscle my way past IT policy and protocols, and use a system that noone else at work can interface with.

The hours/days/weeks you have wasted/will-waste pining away for a workable Perl solution on windows could have been applied to a finished product in C#.

I've spent nearly a decade getting to know the ins and outs of Perl, and because of this I can write the script in a matter of minutes, flush out testing, package, and deploy in under an hour.

While I greatly appreciate your confidence in my skills to learn C# to the same level of competence in merely an hour, I'm not man enough to have that level of confidence in myself.

your time (and your clients'/boss' time) would be best spent on something that will actually work.

What I do works. In under an hour. Including testing. But I suppose I'm not man enough to properly assess what "actually works" and what doesn't.

The free version of Visual Studio will probably do everything you need, for free.

Wow, it compiles my Perl scripts and creates single-step remotely-deployable programs for remote systems that don't have Perl installed? Cool! I'll have to check this out. I hope I'm man enough to find the Perl packager in it. I haven't been doing too well in the manly department, by your standards, though, so I'm not so confident.

I could write the tools in C -- that's what I used to do -- and MinGW does a great job of giving me an easy-to-deploy executable. It's just...well, the development time's a smidge longer. Okay, I admit it -- I'm just not man enough to do it the hard way.

WTF?

Oooh! Oooh! I know the answer to this one! You're man enough to tell everyone else that they must do it your way, and man enough to use TMTOWTDI at the same time.

:: applause ::

Get Over It

I agree that there is one person in this conversation who has demonstrated a need to get over something.

So -- let's face it. You win. You've proven you're better than everyone else here. You can leave, smug in the self-assured knowledge that you are superior, that you have all the right answers, and that you are better than me.

Congratulations.

[DrHyde]

What I do works

Except it doesn't work, as you found out when you tried to package it. A good programmer considers the whole "development lifecycle", from helping his customer (or employer) to create the spec in the first place, all the way through to deploying it (which you appear to have buggered up) and maintaining it afterwards.

[marinersk]

My apologies if I wasn't clear.

What I do now works.

:-)

[JavaFan]

why are you using Windows?

Because that's the system they give me to work on

I'd quit if that ever would happen to me. I've never taken, and will never take, a job that involves "do this task on an OS I tell you to, and you don't know".

It's unlikely to happen in my current gig though. All production machines (1000+) run some form of Unix^† and for dev machines, they just give us the choice of hardware (x86 or apple), and freedom to run whatever we like. (So we have devs running MacOS, Windows, a bunch of Linux distros, a few BSD boxes, and one guy running OpenSolaris).

^†We may have a few non-client facing, non-Unix systems. Like the SAP boxes. But they run bought, commercial software, not something we develop in-house. But they may run Unix as well (or something completely different) - I just do not know.

[jdrago999]

If the question were, instead...

"How do I make this completely Microsoft-dependent software system work on Linux?"

...my response would have been basically the same, but in reverse - Use Perl. Sure, there's Mono (which does work fairly well) but for something like this - a piece of software with a GUI that must run on users' desktops - you are asking for trouble if you do anything outside of Microsoft's preordained canon.

If you don't believe me - that writing GUI code on Windows is a pain with Perl - ask the nice folks who have been working on "Padre" for the last few years. Combine a simple language (comparatively) like C# and a drop-dead-simple IDE like Visual Studio and, well, basically anyone capable of right-clicking and typing "Hello World" can make a network-deployable windows GUI application. That bar is set pretty high (I know) but I suppose the line has to be drawn somewhere.

"So -- let's face it. You win. You've proven you're better than everyone else here. You can leave, smug in the self-assured knowledge that you are superior, that you have all the right answers, and that you are better than me."

Smug? Maybe popping one's bubble for their own good will be misread as smug. Your skills as a competent Perl programmer put you in a great position to learn C# (enough, anyway) quickly - very quickly. In fact most of the "innovations" I've seen in C# over the last few years have been in Perl since version 5.0 came out or earlier. To me, C# seems to be stuck in catch-up mode, trying to mimic what's going on in Perl and Ruby.

And what's with all this "Oooh I'm not man enough to xyz" - popping this perceived vibe of "Perl is the only tool in my box so it's the only tool I'll use" in the OP - however rough and bruising to your ego it might have been - was probably necessary.

Sheesh.

[marinersk]

And what's with all this "Oooh I'm not man enough to xyz"

:: grin :: Just having a little fun, possibly at your expense, by pretending to presume that you were being over-the-top abrasive on purpose.

Of course I don't expect that was true; more likely you just didn't (and apparently, to some degree, still don't) realize just how much your posting style buries your message.

However, this post was less abrasive, and I even upvoted it. For balance, if nothing else. I see it now has a 1. LOL.

however rough and bruising to your ego it might have been

:: grin :: Actually, I did not have much invested in this portion of the threadlet but my own entertainment; I had rather hoped a side effect might include you becoming more aware of the effect your posting style has on the quality of your message. No matter if that succeeds or fails, though. Doesn't hurt me and the pain you cause yourself is your problem.

Besides, it would take a LOT more than something like this to touch, much less bruise, my ego. Even if I had been the OP.

Here's wishing you a fine and most excellent day on the day you read this reply.

Cheers!