Re: Perl Doesn't Suck

On Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 03:41:51PM -0500, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote:
> I don't believe I was saying that. My point was that you had a bad
> experience installing Java on FreeBSD and have declared that it sucks to
> install it. Unsurprisingly, I have never had a problem installing or
> supporting Java on Solaris

There's the trick, Solaris is Sun's Blessed Platform.  As a
Linux/PowerPC user, I know how Ziggy feels.  I'm almost totally
ignored by Sun and I'd imagine I'd have just as much trouble getting
it working as he did.

You can almost argue this in reverse with Perl.  The major Unixen are
Perl's blessed platforms, Windows and MacOS are out in the cold
(though to a much lesser degree).  However, there its more a technical
matter than a political/business one.  We're certainly trying like
hell to get Perl up and running on everything (even *grumble* VMS).
Then again, these are all just excuses to the end user who can't
install perl.


> Perl6 could make major bonus points for the SA and for others by improving
> the installation and configuration details to make it more portable and
> more 'packagable' for enterprise deployment. And an SDK.

I've always felt this was the domain of the OS distribution.  Debian,
for example, does a very good job of packing up perl and lots of perl
modules (LWP, DBI, Tk, DBI, etc...) and handling all the dependencies.

Then again, even for big things like Tk or LWP, I've found perl's
installation process to be at least more consistent.  perl Makefile.PL
&& make test && make install will just about do it.  By contract, I've
had to install the JMF under Linux.  HOoooooboy, that was a mess.  All
sorts of little hard-coded paths and config options to tweak and
jigger, copying things around by hand.  Unpleasent.  I'd imagine it
would be easier to do on Solaris, but that doesn't help me.

But yes, module installation can be made easier.  We're working on it.


-- 
Michael G Schwern   <[email protected]>   http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/
Perl6 Quality Assurance     <[email protected]>       Kwalitee Is Job One