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Re: Should we bring in Module::Runtime into core?

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From:
Leon Timmermans
Date:
December 6, 2016 09:52
Subject:
Re: Should we bring in Module::Runtime into core?
Message ID:
CAHhgV8gjVgo8tRPQJ8TAhVi1+-3+ftLiDj_oZLW=2=zcbZaCQg@mail.gmail.com
On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 6:10 PM, Aristotle Pagaltzis <pagaltzis@gmx.de>
wrote:

> A few years back there was an oft-cited sort-of rule (but maybe more of
> an aspiration) that we should only have modules in core that are needed
> to build perl itself or to install modules from CPAN.
>
> Obviously at the time we already have a bunch of stuff grandfathered in,
> and we didn’t even have a procedure for getting things back out. In part
> that was because it is actually very hard to really get things out once
> you consider perl at the OS vendor package level rather than just within
> the CPAN bubble.
>
> Even so, the rule leaves grey area around modules that implement things
> which are in some sense part of the language without being built into
> the interpreter directly, like Time::Piece being based on a old Larry
> design for localtime’s return value, or the Scalar/List/Hash::Util stuff
> (at least some of which really ought to have been inside the interpreter
> itself… an old story).
>
> Is Module::Runtime either of these? It does not seem that way to me.
>
> > Here's my basic pitch:
>
> The rule I mentioned was a reaction to the bad old days of when CGI.pm
> in core acted as a drag on adoption of better CPAN-based alternatives.
> And it was added to core because it had won the market. We should, at
> the least, not go back to that way of doing things without awareness of
> how we got where we are.
>
> Esp. given how costly it is to our downstreams when we realise we need
> to course-correct.
>

I think I agree. The main reason in favor seems to be "it would be one
dependency less for a number of commonly used frameworks", which isn't that
much of a good reason.

If anything, I'd lean towards fixing Module::Load, if only because we
actually have other modules in core that already depend on it (mostly via
Module::Load::Conditional).

Leon

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