Re: Not-completely-portable modules

On Thu, Oct 28, 1999 at 01:09:05AM -0500, Jacob Kenner wrote:
> There is but one perl, but there are but many platforms.  Unfortunately,
> this disparity problem will probably never be completely resolved.  Can we
> not have a generic sdk for perl, and, in addition, an sdk for each
> platform that has additionsal useful modules?

Why?  That shifts some of the responsibility of determining suitability
from the user to the SDK generator.  What's wrong with having *ONE* SDK
that encompasses many collections of possibly platform specific modules?
That way someone may find that they need to do task X on platform Y
and a module that almost does what they want exists for platform Z.
Then they could port the module such that it works on platform Y.

My conception of the SDK is one of enabling people to do
useful things.  Just because somethings are useful on one platform
doesn't mean they aren't useful on another.

> Thus, the perl-sdk would be generic, across all platforms.  The
> perl-sdk-win32 would augment the perl-sdk with win32 extensions, the
> perl-sdk-solaris would augment the perl-sdk with solaris extensions, etc.
> Is this a possible option?  I understand that involves some work on our
> parts, but it could be useful to the administrator.

I dislike this SDK forking, but I'd be happy grouping like things
together and telling people about the organization.  (Sort of like a
mini-CPAN)

-Scott
-- 
Jonathan Scott Duff
[email protected]