[Catalyst] problems installing

[Nathan Kurz]

Hello ---

I've been looking at Catalyst for a while, and for the first time
thought I'd build a little test application with it today.  My install
process has been, well, less than smooth.  I'm still not there, but
while I upgrade Perl here are some notes on the workarounds I needed,
followed by a few things that I think could be fixed to make it smoother.

install Catalyst 
   very long, lots of dependencies, some error messages, but seemed to work

install Task::Catalyst
   lots of problems...

look SRI/Task-Catalyst-1.50.tar.gz  
# cpansign -v
# exit
    Task-Catalyst not properly signed, so fake it

install Params::Validate  
   required for Catalyst::Log::Log4perl 
Date::Calc  
   required for HTML::Widget required by Catalyst::Plugin::HTML::Widget

force install RPC::XML  
   currently test fails with error about 'modifying lvalue'

install Task::Catalyst fails again because of signing:
  after first time substitute 'test Task::Catalyst'

Catalyst::Plugin::I18N requires I18N::LangTags::Detect,
   which is only present in perl-5.8.6


I'm a very experienced Linux Perl user, and this is one of the more
troublesome CPAN installs that I have done.  At this point, I'm two
hours into it, and only now am I told I need to upgrade Perl.

While some of the problems are due to the outside CPAN modules, part
of the problem is that the base Catalyst install requires so many
modules.  Personally, I'm going to plow through these problems until I
get it to work, because I'm pretty excited about the Catalyst
architecture (which seems great).  But I'm sure there are many others
who have given up.  If keeping these potential users is important (and
it might not be) then the install difficulty needs to be addressed.

Short term suggestions:

1) Make sure that Task::Catalyst is signed properly.
2) Set overall upfront Perl version requirements to 5.8.6 
   (or drop whatever is causing that dependency)
3) Add Params::Validate to dependencies for Catalyst::Log:Log4Perl
4) Add Date::Calc to dependencies for Catalyst::Plugin::HTML::Widget, 
   even though it probably isn't our fault.
5) Maybe make whatever is using RPC::XML non-default until RPC::XML
   can pass its tests?  Or maybe this is a Perl version error too.

Off to upgrade Perl,

Nathan Kurz
nate at verse.com

ps.  Yell at me if you need to.  I like the architecture enough that
     if killing the messenger seems necessary, I'll just accept it.