Problematic perl prerequisites
Date : 01 15 2008 Category : Web
O'Reilly Network Articles and WeblogsI just installed XMLRPC::Lite on a Linux host. You may not have seen this module used too often, but it actually comes bundled in the SOAP::Lite distribution.
Installation time of one perl module in a 5.8.8 environment? One hour. Was it slow Internet bandwidth? Am I counting the meeting time where we discussed the need for this code? Neither. The install took one hour due to the need to satisfy all of the code dependencies.
On a host with a default perl installation, I also had to install the dependencies TimeDate, HTML-Tagset, HTML-Parser, MailTools, MIME-Types, Email-Date-Format, Test-Pod, Pod-Escapes, libwww-perl, Crypt-SSLeay, XML-Parser, Compress-Raw-Zlib, IO-stringy, File-Temp, IO-Compress-Zlib, IO-Compress-Base, Pod-Simple, MIME-Tools, FCGI, and Compress-Zlib. I also had to install the openssl-devel and expat-devel RPMs to satisfy the build requirements of some of the modules. And I didn’t get one nice full list of 20 dependencies to be satisfied; I had a list that seemed to grow with each module distribution that I installed.
I didn’t want to make the job too difficult, because this was a special case server outside of our normal support environment. No RPM packages were readily available, so going through a build process was still the quickest option.
I’m not angry, but I’ll admit to some frustration and confusion. The first question that will come to my mind is why aren’t some of these modules shipped by default yet? Or, out of all of these modules, how many of them are actually being used?
Is there anyone using Compress::Raw::Zlib that wouldn’t also want to install Compress::Zlib? Why bundle these modules separately? Are the extra Test and Pod modules really necessary for the end user, or does it just make the developers job easy? And is Email::Date::Format the only module out there that outputs the time in the RFC 2822 time format?
Again, no harm’s done; but I hope that perl authors and distributors keep this anecdote in mind. The less effort that I need to go through to install your code, the easier my job gets.