Yesterday I released App::Info to the CPAN. I started it on Friday, and put the finishing touches on it just yesterday. It was a busy weekend.
I got the idea for App::Info after looking at the work Sam Tregar has done building an installer for Bricolage. He had done all this work to determine whether and how Apache, PostgreSQL, Expat, and libiconv had been installed, and it seemed a shame not to take that code and generalize it for use by others. So I whipped up App::Info, with the idea of building a framework for aggregating data about applications of all kinds, specifically for the purpose of determining dependencies before installing software.
I think it has turned out rather well so far. I added code to determine the version numbers of libiconv and Expat, although it's imperfect (and that accounts for the CPAN-Testers failures -- I'll have a better release with some of the bugs fixed shortly). But overall the idea is for this to be a uniform architecture for learning about software installed on a system, and I'd like to invite folks to contribute new App::Info subclasses that provide metadata for the applications for which they're most familiar.
That said, this is a new module, and still in flux. I've been talking to Dave Rolsky about it, as he has been thinking about the need for something like this, himself. In the past, Dave and I have talked about creating a generalized API for installing software, and Dave has even set up a Savannah project for that purpose. In truth, I had envisioned App::Info as one part of such an initiative -- the part responsible for determining what's already installed. And while the API I've created is good for this, Dave points out that it's not enough. We need something that can also prompt the user for information -- to determine if the right copy of an application was found, for example.I think I can work this in to App::Info relatively easily, however. Currently, if App::Info can't find the data it needs, it issues warnings. But this isn't the best approach, I think. Sometimes, you might want such errors to trigger exceptions. Other times, you might want them totally silent. So I was planning to add a flag to the API such that you can specify the behavior for such errors. Something like DBI's RaiseError or PrintError options. But then, it's just another step to add a prompting option. Such an option can be changed to prompt for new data at every step of the process, or only at important points (like finding the proper copy of httpd on the file system) or only when data can't be found.
So I hope to find the tuits to add this functionality in the next week. In the meantime, I'm going to try to keep up-to-date on my journal more.
What about using one of the structured Exception classes, so that people who create their own subclasses can create (and throw) their own exceptions based on the name of their module/subclass? Just a thought.
Re:Structured exceptions?
Theory on 2002-06-05T02:43:24
Actually, that's more or less exactly what I was thinking of doing. The various subclasses would know what to do with a
throw()depending on how the verbosity flag (for lack of a better word) was set.
Re:iconv
Theory on 2002-06-05T18:14:22
I'm not surprised. It's just something I threw together as an example. Some versions of
iconv.hdon't appear to have the version number in them, either. However, I didn't get into this to have horribly complicated things to do (only PostgreSQL is easy to interrogate). Rather, I wanted to create a uniform interface for this sort of thing, and people who know more about the various packages than I do could contribute them and keep them up-to-date.IOW, patches welcome!
Re:iconv
Matts on 2002-06-05T22:02:16
Well feel free to steal code from AxKit's Makefile.PL (see the have_library() stuff).
