* Adam Kennedy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2007-04-20 18:30]: > Module::Build's main attitude has always been to make things > easier for authors at the expense of users, in part by > implementing things that the rest of the tool-chain simply > doesn't support.
And Module::Install makes things easy for users at the expense of authors. Imagine the churn caused my new M::I releases if half the CPAN was using M::I and all authors were active all the time. Imagine the problems if half the CPAN was using M::I and a serious bug was found in it while many authors, as is the case in reality, are intermittently AWOL. That doesn’t scale either. As far as I’m concerned, `configure_requires` is the solution that should have been implemented IN THE FIRST PLACE. Not M::B and not M::I. It isn’t just that “well we had to do `configure_requires` because M::B is too widespread now and M::B needs it” – as if the rest of the toolchain didn’t have any real issues. It’s the other way around – the most serious issue in the toolchain was that there is no tenable way forward in the absence of a mechanism like `configure_requires`. (Personally I would have favoured a solution wherein the Build.PL or Makefile.PL can signal to the installer that the process needs to start over after installing modules X, Y and Z, as that would provide actual Turing completeness.) *After* fixing that, we could have let a thousand attempts to fix EU::MM’s shortcomings blossom. *Without* overly complicating the installation process for users. > This STILL doesn't fix the problem with current or old default > Perl installations without upgraded CPAN clients, but then you > REALLY can't fix a circular dependency that only occurs due to > events that occured in the past. That should be possible to fix, shouldn’t it? What I’m thinking is Module::Build::Installer which implements just enough of CPAN.pm to recursively download, install and run Module::Build using the existing CPAN::Config, so that you could depend on Module::Build::Installer in a sort-of passthru Makefile.PL. Something like that; not sure of the specifics. In any case it seems eminently solvable to me. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
