Re: The difficulty or ease of packaging Perl/Python/Ruby/PHP applications
Hi Gabor,
On Jan 21, 2008 5:14 PM, Gabor Szabo <szabgab@gmail.com> wrote:
> In PHP, AFAIK, the application developers tend to include all their
> dependencies
> in their application.
Personally, I hate that. Java developers tend to do that too.
> In Perl - at least in the CPAN aware part of it - they usually just
> give you a list of
> dependencies and you have to somehow install all of those before you can attempt
> to install your application.
To us, this is no problem at all, because the dependencies have to go
to different packages after all. So if upstream ships the dependency,
that's just a waste of space since we're not gonna use it.
Also, if upstream if dump enough (I can tell you that this happens all
the time in the Java world) as to include undistributable or
license-incompatible dependencies, you will need to repackage the
original tarball to remove the dependencies.
> So which applications are easier to package in Debian? Those written
> in Perl, Python,
> Ruby or PHP? Is there some clear line there or is that just really
> different from
> application to application?
I don't have any experience for Python, PHP or Ruby stuff. I have
tried many times to package java stuff, and that was hell. Specially
because of the dependencies: not only obvious problems like I said
before, but also files that you don't know either: the license,
author, version or location to download it!!
If people just listed dependencies with their versions as perl people
do, this problems wouldn't exist.
> Is there something the Perl community can learn from the others that
> will make the life
> of the (Debian) packagers easier?
I think others (at least, Java, I can't speak about what I don't know)
have more to learn from perl than the other way around :)
If only CPAN made it a little easier to retrieve metadata, it'd be great.
--
Martín Ferrari
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