On Wednesday 03 October 2001 01:12 pm, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> > No, CPAN is just a convienience.  It's thorns have nothing to do with the
> > design of the language.  Ruby, C, C++, *ALL* languages if they are used
> > this way will have a huge dependency graph.
> >
> > Perl has faults, but this isn't one of them.
>
> Sounds to me like you're really saying the same thing -- not
> criticizing CPAN in particular, as much as the need for it.

No, I'm not criticizing the need for CPAN or anything at all.  The posting 
mentioned some consequences of the module system in Perl and went on to 
suggest this indicated poor design.  I don't agree.  You need CPAN simply
because there is so much Perl code available.

I'm merely stating that one of the major benefits of Perl, it's huge module 
library, can be a hinderance in some situations.  You can't put all of it in 
NetBSD's base.  Where do you draw the line?

Perl is all about commitment.  Whenever I use it at work I make sure the 
others involved understand it's non-trivial, especially if they make heavy 
use of the available base of code.

As far as putting it in an OS as part of the base package, I don't have a 
firm opinion, but I lean toward not doing it right now.

> On first thought, it seems like perl in the base tree would be less
> trouble to maintain than perl in pkgsrc. 

[snip]

I'm not sure you could or would want to include a base Perl package that also 
included even a significant portion of the module library.  It's pretty huge.