Weekly edition	Kernel	Security	Distributions	Contact Us	Search
Archives	Calendar	Subscribe	Write for LWN	LWN.net FAQ	Sponsors

Perl 5.12.0 released

Posted Apr 13, 2010 21:42 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
Parent article: Perl 5.12.0 released

Am i the only one who thinks that CPAN is a mess? I keep running into packages that just don't work, for example JSON::Shell or Devel::REPL (i got the latter to run by installing Moose-0.96 instead of the current version. Why doesn't CPAN figure that kind of stuff out for me?).

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Apr 14, 2010 0:57 UTC (Wed) by dave0 (subscriber, #32760) [Link]

Well, it can figure it out for you, but only if the module maintainer specifies their dependencies correctly. File a bug.

Perl 5.12.0 released

Posted Apr 14, 2010 4:52 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

wow you found 2 packages out of 10000 that are broken

there goes the neighborhood

this arg comes up all the time. yet no one bothers applying it to the libraries for other languages, which have an error rate no better, and far fewer packages

cpan is still the gold standard for libraries

Perl 5.12.0 released

Posted Apr 14, 2010 7:26 UTC (Wed) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]

Funny, that must have been really bad luck. I've probably never found a CPAN module that did not work out of box; and our Perl application is not that small -- ~300k loc, imagine the number of CPAN dependencies.

CPAN is rather liberal in what it accepts, therefore being a bit careful when picking a dependency might not be a bad idea either. Ask yourself if a module is properly maintained: Did the module have more than two releases already? Was it updated in a year or two? Is the documentation sufficient?

Why doesn't CPAN figure that kind of stuff out for me?).

It does, sort of. Smoke tests are run regularly and results are reported to maintainers.

Perl 5.12.0 released

Posted Apr 17, 2010 11:21 UTC (Sat) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link]

Noooo, no you're not. I mean there's a great deal of stuff in there which does just work etc, but the bit that gets me is the search... it will produce results that when you click, it tells you they don't exist. Frustration! How does the search find something that's not there?!! And I'm sure it previously used to have more subcategories etc for modules to go into so you could 'browse' for stuff that could be of interest rather than just know what you're searching for... I guess google is probably the answer huh.