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Re: Term::ReadLine::Perl in Bundle::CPAN

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From:
David Golden
Date:
August 25, 2009 03:37
Subject:
Re: Term::ReadLine::Perl in Bundle::CPAN
Message ID:
5d4beb40908250337r3dd55d77p676c5290c3027e4c@mail.gmail.com
Term::Readline::Perl pisses me off, too, but it's not a core module so
complaining on perl5-porters is a bit off topic.  I'm going to forward
your email to cpan-workers and reply there.

-- David

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 4:40 AM, Zefram<zefram@fysh.org> wrote:
> Term::ReadLine::Perl is pissing me off.  It has an obnoxious install
> process, wherein "make test" starts up a program that uses the readline
> facility and demands input from the tty.  If you've got Term::ReadKey
> installed, it even throws away typeahead.  If you're installing it (as a
> dependency of something else) on many perls consecutively, or from cron,
> the installations grinds to a halt at that point.
>
> This obnoxious behaviour is a problem because T:RL:P is part of
> Bundle::CPAN.  It gets installed (or at least gets an attempt to install
> it) pretty often.  By proxy, Bundle::CPAN has obnoxious installation
> behaviour.  We need to fix this.  I see three main possibilities for
> doing this:
>
>    (0) Get T:RL:P itself fixed.
>
>    (1) Put a workaround into CPAN.pm.
>
>    (2) Drop T:RL:P from Bundle::CPAN.
>
> I have so far tried approach 0, and it's not looking good.  I submitted
> a minimal patch, via RT, but the author refuses to believe that anyone
> does "big installs" via automated tools such as CPAN.pm.  Maybe someone
> more diplomatic than I am can talk him round, but I suspect not.
>
> Approach 1 would be pretty easy, though of course Wrong.  T:RL:P will skip
> the interactive test if it sees a true value in $ENV{AUTOMATED_TESTING}.
> CPAN.pm could locally put that in the environment, specifically for
> "make test" on T:RL:P.
>
> Approach 2 would preferably involve having some alternative full-editing
> T:RL:* to include in the bundle.  T:RL:Gnu is problematic because
> it relies on a C library.  There is a T:RL:Zoid, which on a cursory
> look seems very satisfactory, and it even manages to test most of
> the interactive behaviour without making the test suite interactive.
> Using this automatically in CPAN.pm would require either CPAN.pm to detect
> it and set up $ENV{PERL_RL}, or a dual-lifed version of Term::ReadLine
> that includes T:RL:Zoid among the defaults to look for.
>
> Preferences?
>
> -zefram
>

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