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Postings from June 2013
On Sat, 01 Jun 2013 10:02:18 -0400, Ricardo Signes wrote: > * Peter Scott <Peter@PSDT.com> [2013-06-01T09:20:24] >> I would like to add a belated argument for the pedagogical value of >> CGI.pm. > > I am a *big* fan of pedagogical arguments! > > That said, this sounds to me like an argument not to delete CGI.pm from > the CPAN, rather than to not remove it from core. Is the issue that > students must (fsvo "must") only be taught with things installed in the > core distribution in many contexts? Not a must. This isn't cut-and-dried. Of course at some point the students must learn how to install from CPAN. It is not a short conversation. Not (for the most part) because we don't have succinct tools but because of the decision points: local::lib vs root and the RPM option, cpanm vs modules that need manual intervention. And at some point that arrives all too soon, they will grab some innocent module that downloads 50 others, one of which requires some sleuthing. So I prefer to introduce as much value as possible and get the student to a certain degree of comfort with Perl before subjecting them to that so that they trust that the effort is going to be worth it. Can I move CGI.pm from one side of that time-to-learn-CPAN line to the other? Of course. I just happen to feel that its usefulness to the beginner trying to get a handle on this stuff justifies what seems to be a small cost of keeping it in the core, because it can be used and understood with the relatively little knowledge and expertise of students who haven't reached the line yet. Consider also not a little legacy documentation of various kinds that expects CGI.pm to be in core, all of which could be considered an argument for backwards compatibility. -- Peter ScottThread Previous | Thread Next