Re: [Caml-list] standard regex package

["Benjamin C. Pierce" <bcpierce@saul.cis.upenn.edu>]

> For those who don't know: You can
> install almost every 3rd party Perl package by simply doing
> 
> perl Makefile.pl
> make
> make test
> make install
> 
> It is simple to do, and that's an important aspect of the success of Perl (a
> language which is nothing without CPAN).

Having just spent 90 minutes last weekend trying to get a PERL package
installed and working, I can say with confidence that PERL's standard
installation procedure, while slick, leaves one big thing to be desired:
following dependencies.  The problem with the "CPAN way" is that it leads
to 10,000 people writing cool little packages, all of which depend on ten
other cool little packages written by somebody else, etc., etc.
Following all these dependency chains manually by trying to install one
package, failing, grepping around in CPAN for the ones it depends on,
downloading them, trying to install, failing, ... is a pretty boring way
to spend a morning.

I really wish that I'd been able to say to some tool, "I want to use
module X; please go off to CPAN and find, download, and install me the
current versions of X and all the modules it transitively depends on."  I
know that it would be reallyreally hard to design a framework that would
always do the right thing, but if it did the right thing 99% of the time
and gave me a type error in 99% of the cases where it did not do the
right thing, it would be fantastic (and I believe both of these numbers
would be rather easy to achieve by low-tech means).

    Benjamin

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