[Catalyst] Re: A few questions (possibly a FAQ)

[Joe Landman]

Hi Matt:

Matt S Trout wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 08:30:24AM -0500, Joe Landman wrote:
>>   This system will (upon completion) generate a competely functional 
>> Perl tree + all our modules.  It wouldn't be hard to separate it out so 
>> that it built a completely functional Perl tree + Catalyst modules.   If 
>> someone wants that, please let me know, and we can post it.  It is a 
>> work in progress so it might not be fully functional right now (it 
>> isn't, as I keep adding little things like authentication).
> 
> How is this system going to be different to a straightforward perl build
> with a bunch of extra bundled modules (you get the option to select some
> during the build process) and the results of installwatch or a similar
> program?

We start our by building Perl the way we need it with the right options 
compiled in for our needs.  We have tried leveraging the existing 
distribution Perl's only to find that some modules we need do not 
compile properly against them.  They are never the same set of modules 
which fail to compile (all CPAN modules BTW).

It would be functionally similar to a perl build with the bunch of 
modules, though we have found that in some distributions when we replace 
Perl with a repaired RPM that various core services stop functioning. 
So we decided upon a separate tree.

Our build is pretty straightforward.  Uses a make file to automate 
things and track dependencies.  If we can get the normal Perl build to 
do this, that would be great.  It wasn't clear to me how, if we included 
Task::Catalyst in one of the modules, that it would be able to first 
find, and then second pull down all the dependant bits.  If it does 
this, please do point me to the FAQ (I would appreciate the 
clue-by-four) that I missed.  My understanding is that we still have to 
pull down all the dependencies by hand.  If there is a better way, 
really, I am all ears!  Using the CPAN mechanism would be great, though 
my customers sometimes don't have access to CPAN, and shipping a 3 GB 
tarball is considered bad form.

Actually, if there was a way to do

	perl -MCPAN -e 'install 
Task::Catalyst::with:all::the::nice::plugins::like::sessions::and::authentication' 
-p /path/to/install/tree

this would be very helpful... :)

If there was a Bundle::Catalyst::Minimal which gave a minimal (baseline) 
Catalyst, a Bundle::Catalyst::Plugins::Sessions, a 
Bundle::Catalyst::Plugins::Authentication, ...  this might make life 
that much easier ...  (s/Bundle/Task/g)



Joe

Joe

> 

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
web  : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423
fax  : +1 734 786 8452
cell : +1 734 612 4615