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December 1999

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Re: [Distutils] Distutils integration
by Greg Ward Dec. 6, 1999

Dec. 6, 1999

On 29 November 1999, T-Methy Moddletin said: > >Oh well, that's the mess the Perl world was in five years ago before > >Jarkko Hietaniemi came along and cooked up CPAN. > > Hmmm, i'm not familiar with pre-CPAN Perl. Perhaps you could enlighten > me? What exactly was the nature of the "mess"? Perhaps there are other > ways than CPAN to address some of the problems? Non standard packages? > (You're taking care of that problem, i hope!) But perhaps non-standard > naming as well. Hideously ugly, eyeball splitting web page colours and > designs? (even more eyeball splitting than perl code itself?! <G>). > Broken links? Back in ... ummm... 1995-6 or so, there were a bunch of big, well-known Perl ftp archives. But none of them had everything, none of them were particularly well-organized, and the damn things kept flitting in and out of existence (or so it seemed to me when I was trying desperately to track down a tarball for Perl 5.001m, rather than the 5.001 tarball and patches a .. m). The story I heard (from Tim Bunce and Jarkko Hietaniemi at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference back in August) is something like this: the perl-packrats mailing list had existed for some time as a forum for archive site maintainers and users to bitch, whine, gripe, collude, etc. It didn't accomplish much until Jarkko arrogantly and unilaterally created the "Comprehensive Perl Archive Network" on a machine in Helsinki. It caught on pretty quick. Now, there are roughly 100 CPAN mirrors around the world, and I can find whatever I want as fast as I like. And if you want a meta-archive, there's search.cpan.org, which IMHO is what the Python world really needs. I don't care what you think about Perl, go visit that site *now*. From the top, you can browse by module category (taken straight from the Perl Module List). Or you can search by author name (or ID -- every CPAN contributor has a user ID), module name, or distribution name. You can search the text of all the documentation for every module uploaded to CPAN. This is an absolutely red-hot, kick-ass web site. Poking around it, I'm trying to remember why I use Python. Oh yeah, it has actual syntactic support for OO programming, that's why. ;-) I think one of the things I like about search.cpan.org is that it's sort-of a meta-archive, and sort of a centralized archive. All the search results you get back include the author's home page and email address, but if you want to download something -- bam, it comes straight from the archive at perl.com. (I guess it has more bandwidth than cpan.org or something.) The biggest problem I have with meta-archives is the one you have already found: broken links. And you already know the two most obvious solutions: scan the database regularly and rigorously, bitching at developers whose links break; and have an optional central archive that downloads stuff from developer's pages and puts it somewhere whose links *won't* break. I haven't used freshmeat much, but I've been impressed -- I don't think I've seen many broken links. Compare that to my unpleasant experience trying to find some free Java classes (because Sun somehow forgot that "the programming language for the Internet" might need to do MIME decoding -- oops). There is a big meta-archive at gamelan.com, but for everything I found -- bam, broken links everywhere. I think this just means that Linux developers have more of a clue about Internet culture than Java developers. I would expect the same degree of cluefulness from Python programmers, so I don't think a Python meta-archive would be as bad as gamelan.com... but it still needs careful link-policing! > Of course if there was a central archive, that takes care of finding > things as well (assuming everyone wants to bother with going to the > trouble of getting archived there). Still I must dissent. In > retrospect, I am not fond of CPAN. I do not miss it. I do not consider > it a model for emulation. It had perhaps some useful attributes----but > I am (and hopefully I don't just say this because it is the nature of > my-project-which-i-must-protect) genuinely in favour of > decentralised resources. I think it's more encouraging to people to > directly and easily control and release their stuff (and for those > who want to upload somewhere there is still ftp.python.org!) While > there are certain weaknesses and logistic complications (and yeah, > perhaps "mess" also!) it seems a much freer environment to me. Less > stuffy, as it were. Less official! Perhaps my biases are showing a > little too strongly. I find the rigidity of CPAN just a little too > intimidating, in fact. Legitimate difference of opinion. I think the B&D of CPAN (and all the other tools and tricks involved, principally MakeMaker and POD) is well worth it considering the payoff. Part of the payoff is search.cpan.org, and part is the ability to install a large and complex module distribution with a single command (at least under Unix): perl -MCPAN -e 'install ("Tk");' ... or something like that. If you have a functioning Perl installation, you might try that out. If things work out right, it does *everything* needed to find, download, configure, build, test, and install that very large module distribution. The only thing it doesn't do is order *Learning Perl/Tk* from amazon.com for you. I will continue to argue for just the right amount of bondage, discipline, structure, and bureaucracy to achieve that level of automation. The trick is using the *bare minimum* of bureaucracy that will achieve the desired result, and that's why I will continue to listen to people like you and Greg Stein arguing for anarchy. ;-) > I have never used as CSV in my live-long life. And it probably shows. > (-: I see all the strange $ codes in people's source and i think: wow, > that looks impressively obscure and archane, someday i'll have to > figure that out! However, i'm open to all these ideas. I have nothing > intrinsically against a central archive, and would certainly welcome > it (and happily index it---for myself, if no one else) --- let me > know when you open one. (-: I think you mean CVS. I strongly recommend the RCS/SCCS book from O'Reilly. (Just ignore the SCCS chapters.) If you're a lone programmer, CVS is overkill and RCS usually does the trick. For group projects, CVS (or something like it) is absolutely critical. Again, it's a question of imposing just enough bureaucracy and structure to get things done efficiently without bogging everyone down. RCS and CVS provide the right level of bureaucracy for me; other projects might prefer something like Aegis (which, roughly, requires that you write test code to validate every change you want to check in -- ouch!). Greg -- Greg Ward - software developer gward(a)cnri.reston.va.us Corporation for National Research Initiatives 1895 Preston White Drive voice: +1-703-620-8990 Reston, Virginia, USA 20191-5434 fax: +1-703-620-0913

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