In MBA one of the things people are taught is that you have to have good distribution channels for your product.
Our product is perl, CPAN modules and applications written in Perl.
Let's look at the CPAN modules:
Our distribution channels are Linux/*BSD/Unix and other OS vendors who distributed binary versions of some CPAN modules. ActiveState and a few volunteers who distribued .ppm packages and CPAN(PLUS)?.pm.
CPAN(PLUS)?.pm are doing fine but even with the recent improvements on Debian and Fedora there are still too few modules packaged and distributed by most of the vendors.
Someone should encourage the help of these distributions. Someone might even finance some of this packaging work but who?
The Perl Foundation?
The Enlightened Perl Organisation?
Any thoughts?
ActiveState distributes all possible CPAN modules - they have automated process of creating ppm files.
Recent work should make creating binary packages easier: configure_requires, MYMETA.yml. I'm planning to add build_requires to EU::MM (patch already done).
I also have an interesting idea, you can read about it on GSoC 2009 Perl Projects, search for "CPAN/OS package interaction".
