Re: Another question re: 2.0

["Adam Thompson" <..hidden..>]

> From: Ian Goodacre [mailto:..hidden..]
>
> Is there a problem with current distribution methods?

Yes.

Somewhere north of 80% of potential users will not install software if it 
isn't available in either their distribution's repository (ports tree, 
apt/yum/that-thing-SLES-uses, portage, etc.) or at least in their 
distribution's "native" format (i.e. RPM).
Even integrators and consultants (like myself) vastly prefer to install 
software from some sort of centralized repository - of which CPAN is a 
perfectly good example - rather than downloading and installing from 
tarball.

It's not because I *can't* install from a tarball - I quite certainly can, 
I was porting software long before package management was mainstream on 
UNIX - it's that installing from tarball takes time.  And time means 
money, either in billing my customer or in time that I have to spend on 
myself that I can't spend billing a customer.

Everything about LedgerSMB can be wrapped in a Perl "Bundle" without too 
much trouble - even the templates can be treated as auxiliary files, there 
are quite a few CPAN modules that do that already - and the installation 
routines for CPAN bundles have fairly-well-established idioms for 
interactive prompting (viz. Bundle::CPAN installation, in fact!) I don't 
see any reason why CPAN wouldn't work.

Then there's the downstream benefits: rewrapping a CPAN bundle as a 
distribution-specific package isn't always trivial, but it's such a common 
task that there are reasonably-well-documented tools and techniques for 
doing so.  This potentially eliminates much of the heavy lifting a 
distribution packager would have to do otherwise, esp. WRT prompting for 
information during interactive installation and building a file manifest.

I would still see CPAN as being, for most people, a fallback - but in my 
mind, anything that makes it easier to bundle into a .rpm or .deb or 
ebuild or port is a major improvement.  Better distribution = more users. 
More users = more vigorous development.  (And, of course, more users = 
more money for consultants, too.  I don't make money off LSMB, so it 
doesn't matter to me /personally/, but having dozens or hundreds of people 
out there extending and enhancing the core product almost universally 
translates to a better core product for me.)

There's something to be said for the good ol' tarball.  But in a world 
where software management is an increasingly important part of any system, 
what is usually said... amounts to "Yuck".  (Or in today's lingo, "oh man, 
you've gotta be kidding, no way, that's so Old School" - quoting a former 
employee, on the subject of manually installing from a tarball.)

-Adam Thompson
 (204) 291-7950
 ..hidden..