Re: Draft manifest

Jarkko Hietaniemi <[email protected]> writes:

> > I would imagine that we'd also want CPAN.pm (or CPANPLUS.pm), at least.
> 
> Which means at the very least Socket and MakeMaker.

Socket, yes. MakeMaker, maybe not, if we can get to the point of
prebuilt distributions.
I think it is permissible to have a perl core that requires external
tools (e.g., a browser) to download additional kits (e.g., CPANPLUS +
MakeMaker) so that from there on CPANPLUS can handle all additional
installs.

In any case I do not think the goal is to obtain an absolute minimum
set of modules. Just an acceptable small set.

For convenience, we need a couple of predefined distributions:

  - just the core (perl + Config.pm + DynaLoader)
    useful only for bootstrapping (nevertheless useful)
  - core + minimal extensions (e.g., networking, CPANPLUS)
  - core + practical extensions (minimal + CGI + XML)
  - core + all extensions

As a consequence, the Perl configuration and build process could be
modified to concentrate on building the core, and then use core perl
for configuring/building the rest.

And whatever choices are made, a lot of them will be arbitrary.

-- Johan