Bundling modules

gnat on 2001-07-18T19:01:54

There's a big discussion taking place on perl5-porters, about adding modules to the standard distribution. The two camps are, obviously:

• Adding modules makes Perl more useful out of the box. Do it!
• Adding modules just means more crap I don't use taking up space on my hard disk. Don't do it!

This topic is going to be discussed at the TPC perl5-porters meeting. This is such a divisive issue (almost as divisive as the ||| defined-or operator!), I wonder whether we'll see any resolution from it.

There are a million side issues and projects talked about. CPAN should be easier to use! We should make precompiled modules available! The distinction between CPAN and the core should be blurred! We want lightweight distributions! We don't want Python to get ahead of us! We should do an SDK!

It seems like every year there's an earnest meeting about how to fix CPAN, yet nobody ever does it. search.cpan.org came out of one of those meetings, I think, but that relied on the hard work of Graham Barr and Elaine Ashton to come to fruition. I sure hope something other than heat and light comes out of this year's meeting.

I've really come to appreciate how hard it is to get anything done in open source without doing it yourself. That is to say, managing any number of people who aren't employed by you, aren't in the same location as you, and who aren't working on the task from 9-5 each day, is an exercise in frustration.

Tomorrow we fly to LA for family stuff before the Open Source Convention in San Diego. I'm so excited! I can't wait to see everyone at the conference.

--Nat