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Postings from November 2005
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.
>
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