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Re: CGI.pm is dead, long live CGI.pm

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From:
Tatsuhiko Miyagawa
Date:
June 2, 2013 03:52
Subject:
Re: CGI.pm is dead, long live CGI.pm
Message ID:
CADGpoaPV3+MR1Xnbn2FKAuFu8ZzQ36Hte4=oWJ316qONH=kGQA@mail.gmail.com
On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 10:00 AM, Peter Scott <Peter@psdt.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Right, but you can make it a short conversation, by starting with the
non-brainer one, like cpanm + sudo (or local::lib) and tell them to
investigate other means later.

>  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.

That sounds irrelevant to whether keeping CGI.pm in core or not. At
least not the case with CGI.pm, as long as it gets shipped without
bogus FCGI dependency stripped, which I hope very soon, at the latest
before 5.20.

Look at this way, as soon as you get your CGI script working on day 1,
you will already know how to install CPAN modules. Isn't that great?

> 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.

"CGI is everywhere" is not universal anymore. Many operating system
installations do not come with Apache installed, or at least not
running by default. You have to install and configure the init scripts
to run the httpd process, then configure httpd.conf to run CGI scripts
under cgi-bin, etc.

Meanwhile, if you get CPAN, install Plack and run `plackup yourapp.pl`
and that will run the web server on port 5000, that works even without
having a C compiler. Of course there's a lot of things to learn, but
IMO more fun than learning how to configure apache to execute CGI
scripts on Windows, etc.

I know that if you prepare a host that has configured Apache and CGI
setup, it's just copying CGI scripts there. That's great and simple.
But if you can do that, then installing perl-CGI rpm package in
addition to Apache is a no-brainer either.

--
Tatsuhiko Miyagawa

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