Re: Re: CrazyPPM repository, interested?

[crazyinsomniac]

Why can't ActiveState be persuaded to distribute every module as a ppm?

Good question "chickenman", although the answer is fairly simple : as you know, there is far too many modules and a lot aren't intended for win32, and the only way to find that out is to download each one ..... that's a lot of man hours.

Additionally/alternatively: why can't we download ppm's directly from CPAN (e.g. only for those modules which require compilation).

Well for providing PPM's on CPAN, not bad, except it might bloat CPAN more than it is already (currently at about 1 Gigabyte)...

It's so frustrating to search for a module, check if it needs to be compiled and then still have to search for the ppm. (And I think that this functionality would improve CPAN's usability)

That it is, I wish CPAN allowed for more METADATA to be provided, so it can be indexed, and easily incorporated into the search, so you know before hand if a module needs compiling, or if it was intended for a particular platform: this would make the cpan-tester's' jobs easier ... I think a reasonable "improvement" to cpan would be a METADATA file, just like the MANIFEST or README, which would have key=value pairs like FOR_OS = win32,unix,linux ... or perhaps even have it be XML ...

Maybe someone should propose this to the CPAN folk

 

______crazyinsomniac_____________________________ Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most. perl -e "$q=$_;map({chr unpack qq;H*;,$_}split(q;;,q*H*));print;$q/$q;"