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Re: Hidden dependencies?

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From:
Slaven Rezic
Date:
October 2, 2003 00:08
Subject:
Re: Hidden dependencies?
Message ID:
8765j8kti7.fsf@vran.herceg.de
Aaron Sherman <ajs@ajs.com> writes:

> 
> On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 14:43, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> 
> > > This is a head-in-the-sand approach (as noted before). Perl will be (is)
> > > considered broken on systems that use RPM (and that list grows with some
> > > regularity) because it does not play nicely with external dependency
> > > systems.
> > 
> > Unusually for me I have an impolite and undiplomatic opinion on this subject,
> > which you are perfectly free to regard as "head in the sand":
> > 
> >   I don't care
> > 
> > If someone wants to provide a RPM spec file *and a way to keep it up to
> > date from the MANIFEST* fine - patches welcome.
> 
> I guess it's not worth arguing about too much, but it certainly is the
> case that many separate parties from FreeBSD to Red Hat who have made
> Perl a part of their core OS distribution have had a heck of a time
> tracking Perl's dependencies in an automatic way. Perhaps there's
> something that could be done to help them demonstrate that Perl hasn't
> forgotten that its platform adaptability (via metaconfig) was one of the
> original reasons for its rapid and widespread adoption.

But perl does not have any dependencies, other than a decent C
compiler and a minimal set of unix tools. Everything else is optional
and the vendor may decide whether he includes these dependencies (e.g.
libgdbm and libdb) into his perl package.
 
> Now that metaconfig's approach is mainstream, what can Perl do to
> continue to be one of the world's most easily installed and maintained
> development tools? I don't claim to have the RIGHT answers, I was just
> trying to present ONE to get the conversation moved away from one,
> uninteresting tool.
> 
> > It is not a heuristic dependency checking of p5p's making that is causing
> > all this grief.
> 
> If it were, it would not be causing the grief, one presumes... ;-)
> 

Regards,
	Slaven

-- 
Slaven Rezic - slaven@rezic.de

    tknotes - A knotes clone, written in Perl/Tk.
    http://ptktools.sourceforge.net/#tknotes

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