[OT] PPI

[Ovid]

--- On Fri, 22/8/08, Andy Wardley <abw at wardley.org> wrote:

> From: Andy Wardley <abw at wardley.org>

> I suspect that's why there's not as much visible
> excitement about [PPI] as perhaps there should be.

To a certain extent, PPI suffers from the "Module::Build problem".  While there are valid criticisms of it, the most prevalent one I've noticed is the one that's NOT valid:  "ExtUtils::MakeMaker works for me".  That's because most people, whether consumers or producers, view a build system as a way to copy files from X to Y.  And maybe run tests.  EUMM does that just fine.

When things get complicated, though, and you need heavy lifting from a build system, EUMM is about as useful as a blind interior decorator, but MB makes things trivial.  Producers desperately need something like MB or an equivalent when they have hard build problems to solve (am I running as root?  Is PostgreSQL installed?  Is it the right version?  Does the user have permissions to build the database?  Is the database already built?  And so on ...)

Very few people have programming requirements that PPI solves.  For those who do, there are few alternatives.

Cheers,
Ovid
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