Someone needs to take jwz aside...

[Kieren Diment]

On 21/04/2011, at 7:08 PM, Jason Clifford wrote:

> On Wed, 2011-04-20 at 23:06 -0400, Jesse Vincent wrote:
>>> He's embarrassed that didn't think to run "apt-get install libnet-twitter-perl"?
>> 
>> That doesn't work so well on a vanilla OS X box. Whcih is what his
>> workstation is.
> 
> That's not a perl fail but rather a fail on the part of those who
> package (or don't package) perl modules for that platform.
> 
> In fairness it's also a fail on the various Linux platforms I've
> encountered too as nobody has, so far, produced a comprehensive cpan to
> $whatever_distro repository 



I'm not sure what all the fuss is about.  I've spent a fairly small amount of time lately packaging up perl applications for 4 or 5 different operating systems, on systems with varying degrees of security (ie. from apps that need root, to locked down windows workstations and uncooperative admins). 

On a unixy system, grabbing the latest stable perl, and compiling a relocatable binary is the go.  After that either update $PATH or call the perl binary explicitly and install cpanminus is by far the lowest friction strategy.  The only trouble I've had with this approach is Alien::SVN's insistence that it compiles binaries to /usr/lib.  If I didn't have root on that system I would have been more annoyed.  

Oh and some module was broken in version 0.45 in linux, so I bisected old versions, and it turned out that version 0.44 installed OK, so I shoved a comment in the Makefile.PL, and in INSTALL.pod.  The fact that admins will be expanding an archive rather than having to go through the install machinations themselves makes the inconvenience minor.

On windows, strawberry portable perl is the go.  Just like the unix version except much slower (at least on the VMs I use, and the ludicrously underpowered/small disk space workstation that $employer[0] gives me).  Does anyone have a .bat file handy that will strip out all the toolchain stuff for deployment?

And if you're so inclined you can keep your ~/perl install in a git repository, and while there's some overhead to this, it's a handy way to annotate what you've been doing with your perl.

Of course I don't do sysadmin type stuff.  If I did I'd be using the system perl, pure perl modules and App::FatPacker (oh and Path::Class).

However, none of this is a solution for your management problems.

Leave the system perl for the system and the system will leave perl up to you.