Re: No version in AutoLoader?

[andreas.koenig@anima.de (Andreas J. Koenig)]

>>>>> On Mon, 03 Jan 2000 10:24:41 -0800, Gurusamy Sarathy <gsar@activestate.com> said:

 > On 03 Jan 2000 18:37:37 +0100, Andreas J. Koenig wrote:
>> As soon as CHIPS uploads perl5.004_05, a process should automatically
>> produce
>> 
>> [...]
>> CPAN/authors/id/perl/Safe-2.06.tar.gz
>> CPAN/authors/id/perl/Text-ParseWords-3.1001.tar.gz
>> CPAN/authors/id/perl/VMS-DCLsym-1.01.tar.gz
>> [...]
>> 
>> Done right, this will lead to an index on CPAN that doesn't mention
>> CHIPS/perl5.004_05.tar.gz at all, and instead of what you cite,
>> CPAN::Shell->r will output
>> 
>> Package namespace         installed    latest  in CPAN file
>> AutoLoader                    undef      5.56  perl/AutoLoader-5.56.tar.gz
>> 
>> and the user will be able to say
>> 
>> install AutoLoader
>> 
>> and get what he expects.

 > This appears to be a rather large can of worms to me.

Granted:-)

 >                                                       Modules in
 > the perl distribution sometimes develop dependencies and/or version
 > specific behaviors and may not work in even slightly older
 > versions. How is this to be tracked and flagged?

I'd say that modules that do not work with earlier versions of perl
should be flagged with "use X.Y" in the module itself. The 'make test'
of these modules should catch that fact by trying to load the module.

 > Thus we had better start with perl/5.00556/AutoLoader-5.56.tar.gz etc.,
 > but I don't see a clean way around the other problems.

Wait a second, I'm not talking about development but maintainance
versions only. My impression is that there are not that many modules
that are so extremely version dependent, and if they are there, it
would be wise to specify it in a "use X.Y" statement anyway.

Even if the original, in perl included module, forgot to specify "use
X.Y", it would not be too difficult to publish a newer version in the
directory of the pumpking that has the "use X.Y" statement.

 > IMHO, doing this right involves CPAN.pm getting some fresh ideas
 > about dependencies, and CPAN having a dependencies-index that will help
 > automatically track what needs what else.  If we can get to this point,
 > it would be possible to invoke special actions when CPAN.pm hits a node
 > pointing to the perl distribution in the dependency graph.

I do share your point that a powerful data structure (similar but not
identical to PPD) is called for, no doubt. The problem here is that if
it gets too complicated, we lose on maintainability. I'd like to have
a system that, heh, makes easy things easy and complicated things
possible ;-) My suggestion is only for the "make easy things easy"
side of the problem. The complicated side might need an XML guru which
I am not.

-- 
andreas

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References to:

Gurusamy Sarathy <gsar@ActiveState.com>

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