On Fri, 29 May 2009, Jesse Vincent wrote: > 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.
Note that this already exists with the PPM (Perl Package Manager) repositories. ActiveState PPM build machines attempt to build all CPAN uploads for a variety of architectures: http://ppm4.activestate.com/ You can see that there are a number of other people who also maintain repositories, but typically only for Windows. Of course the main problem with binary package distributions is that there are several Configure options that will generate Perl binaries that are not binary compatible with each other. So the ActiveState PPM repositories only work for ActivePerl, or any other Perl configured in the same way. Cheers, -Jan
