> I support the notion of distributing binaries because nobody's gonna > want to chew up their phone's battery doing unnecessary compiles. The > ecology of computing devices is different from ten years ago.
And, in fact, binary distribution is something that's been done on CPAN for quite a while. A quick poke at the backpan finds things like http://backpan.perl.org/authors/id/G/GS/GSAR/DB_File-1.54-bin-x86-mswin32-bc.zip dating from over a decade a year ago. The motivations for binary distribution have changed, but the need has been there all along. The only thing I'd worry about here is making one of the big mistakes that the Java community made -- Making binary-only distribution an acceptable alternative to source distribution. Nothing should end up on the CPAN unless it's there in source form. Making binary distribution easy is a laudable goal, but it's something the existing infrastructure already supports. I'd love to see "CPAN autobuilders" which build perl modules for a givven platform and architecture and make them generally available. That'd be a lot cleaner than the current ad-hoc system which requires authors to jump through hoops. But really, that's just another CPAN-related service that could easily layer on the existing infrastructure. Best, Jesse
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