Wednesday, October 19, 2005

EuroOSCON 5 - Installation Installation Installation

I saw a demo today of a brilliant web-based Perl debugger called Devel::ebug::HTML. It uses the browser, and appears to have everything you want from a visual debugger.
BUT...
Trying to install it is a nighmare. There is no README file, so no list of dependancies. I start downloading and installing them by hand and choke when I come to Catalyst. So I switch off my firewall (oooooooh) and run cpan, and nothing installs. Tried ppm - the same. Everything downloads OK, but every single one fails on the make - it should be using nmake on windows.
Doing this manually would take for ever, so I give up.

Other Open Source products seem to suffer from the same thing, and it is about time the community did something about it. OK, that means you and me. Something is being done about it, there are many people working on this. I appreciate the complexity, but I don't think the underlying issue is technical. It is trying to bring order to the bazaar, and I am not sure that is possible without turning it into M&S.

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