On Sunday, March 31, 2002, at 04:27 , Jonathan E. Paton wrote:
>> Would anybody tell me what's the difference
>> between using ppm to install a module and
>> downloading it and puting it in my site/lib/?
>
> Yeah, it works properly and is easier. On Unix,
> modules are installed using 'make', which isn't
> available on Windows.
[..]
> Most of the time copying into the right lib
> folder is enough, but sometimes more is
> required to make them work... e.g. download
> the other modules that are required to make
> it work.
[..]
I hadn't thought about the lack of a 'make' utility
under windows - but let me extend on Jonathan's
basic argument a bit - since the same is also true on
various 'unix servers' which were built with a minimal
set of tools as the 'default' configuration for production servers.
There are really two basic 'installation strategies' folks
have to remember when 'bringing in perl' -
a) build, maintain, distribute
- download the modules from the CPAN, et al
- make sure the version skew is not too bad
- distribute to the other hosts
- commonly exported file system
- install locally on each from a common src directory
b) 'binary only delivery' - tied to OS specific
- bring in the tarball
- unwrap it
- install with the local package manager
The first is the 'traditional' strategy most perlMongers
think about - since most of them have all the build tools
on their machines - and get lulled into a false sense of
how things 'will be'.
But if the target host does not have 'make' et al, then
the traditional strategy will not work. If there is no
'network file sharing' strategy between the serves -
this prevents the 'commonly exported file system' solution
as well - and you need a delivery mechanism that will make
sure that correct revs are installed in the correct directories.
Hence one either works with the ppm, or equivolent, approach,
or one 'home rolls' a solution that will make sure that your
OS specific 'package installer' understands how to put the
files where they belong, and how to uninstall them.
At one facility we just 'home rolled' a solution in the
'build system' that outputted solaris packages - with
all of the stock versioning in it so that people on
the 'production network' could simply do
pkginfo -l WARPplx
and see if they had the correct collection of 'perl extensions'
were installed on that production server.
In like manner one simply built the 'product' version of tools
and modules to be delivered in a similar manner.
ciao
drieux
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