From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id XAA11681; Thu, 23 Aug 2001 23:27:41 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id XAA11617 for ; Thu, 23 Aug 2001 23:27:40 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from saul.cis.upenn.edu (SAUL.CIS.UPENN.EDU [158.130.12.4]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f7NLRdH07045 for ; Thu, 23 Aug 2001 23:27:39 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by saul.cis.upenn.edu (8.10.1/8.10.1) with SMTP id f7NLRax03752; Thu, 23 Aug 2001 17:27:36 -0400 (EDT) To: info@gerd-stolpmann.de cc: Brian Rogoff , caml-list@inria.fr Reply-to: bcpierce@cis.upenn.edu Subject: Re: [Caml-list] standard regex package In-reply-to: Your message of Thu, 23 Aug 2001 21:51:10 +0200. <01082322261504.02716@ice> Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 17:27:36 EDT Message-ID: <3750.998602056@saul.cis.upenn.edu> From: "Benjamin C. Pierce" Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk > 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 ------------------- Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr