Well, I'm glad someone brought this up. I've always gotten the CPAN shell's "i" and "install" commands mixed up and have often wanted to pass a distribution name to it. First, the online help ("?" command) and error messages are not entirely helpful. Second, "i" appears too much like a shortcut for "install". And third, the CPAN shell's "install" command very much resembles ActiveState's PPM "install" command, but the latter expects you to specify a distribution name and also has "i" as a shortcut (you can see why one would get confused): ===== ppm> install DBIx-Simple # or "i DBIx-Simple" # --installs distribution ppm> install DBIx::Simple Searching for 'DBIx::Simple' returned multiple results. Using 'search' instead.. Searching in Active Repositories 1. DBIx-Simple [1.26] Easy-to-use OO interface to DBI 2. DBIx-Simple-OO [0.01] Retrieve database rows as objects 3. DBIx-Simple-OO [0.01] Retrieve database rows as objects 4. DBIx-SimpleQuery [0.02] Query databases using as little code as possible 5. DBIx-SimpleQuery [0.02] Query databases using as little code as possible ===== The other gripes I've had about the CPAN shell are it's verbosity (e.g. tons of meaningless messages like "LWP not available"), the cumbersomeness in figuring out how to fix a broken urllist, and the sheer number of questions it asks you when you go to first configure it. I don't want to specify that my pager will be /usr/bin/less. In fact, I don't want to configure anything. I just want to say "install ABC-XYZ" (much like PPM), and _iff_ there is any ambiguity, then prompt me with suggestions (help me out a little). All-in-all, it seems that a simple thing like this should be simple: "I just want to install ABC-XYZ (i.e. the latest version of this distribution, and I don't care how you do it)." I tried out CPANPLUS tonight, which I read is the next generation CPAN shell. I find some improvements here in terms of online help and reduced verbosity. Cygwin (www.cygwin.com) has an example of a fairly user-friendly installer. However, even this could be improved: it could ask fewer questions (or not repeat them every time it is run), and a search/filtering tool would be useful since the Cygwin package list is getting quite lengthy. --davidm Christopher Hicks wrote: > On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, Ken Williams wrote: > >> Think about what would happen if Satan uploaded a malicious >> distribution called "PathTools" with a higher version number than >> mine. You'd want the whole world to get Satan's distribution by >> default, just so they can save a couple keystrokes? > > > Any ambigious situations such as that could easily be handled by > asking the user "KWILLIAMS and SATAN both are providing PathTools, > which would you like?" or having it spit out a list of choices and let > the user implicitly pick by then doing the "install AUTH/dist...gz" at > that point. Is there some REAL chance of harm in what we're talking > about here that couldn't be trivially ameliorated such as here? > > My previous suggestion of having an explicit mapping would help avoid > getting the wrong person's PathTools. It wouldn't have to track > versions in the map since "PathTools" could map to KWILLIAMS/PathTools > and determine the latest from that. And as I pointed out the issue > here isn't merely distnames, but common misimpressions. Being able to > "install Template::Toolkit" won't cause the universe to blow-up. > >> Also, "lack of distname support" is overblowing the situation. >> Distnames are supported perfectly fine as long as you put it in the >> proper syntax with author's ID and version. > > > The proper syntax in this case is unnecessarily complex and utterly > nonobvious to all but the Perl cognescenti. That seems a pretty harsh > way to treat sysadmins stuck with installing Perl-based applications > who may have no prior Perl experience whatsoever. If there were some > real harm in making it easier it might make sense to me, but maybe > somebody can share with me something that's not a red herring that > will help me get it. >Thread Previous | Thread Next