in reply to Dist::Zilla Tutorial for beginners

I renew my original caution—which I’ll point out proved prescient—and partial objection. Dist::Zilla is for power users who already understand the concerns; users owning many modules frequently updated, not those owning a couple rarely touched. In my view, the packages cannot be made beginner friendly because they are not for beginners. I’d loved to be proved wrong.

I skimmed the guide. …I don’t really see this as helping beginners use the packages. It’s more of an apologist tract and marketing pamphlet than a guide. It will be interesting to some but at the end of reading it, no knowledge about how to use the packages is gained, only reasons why one might.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Dist::Zilla Tutorial for beginners
by nysus (Parson) on Sep 23, 2018 at 11:53 UTC

    I can only speak for myself, of course, but an intro like mine would have really helped me make a clear distinction between what a module was and what a distribution was. These concepts were muddy for me. Also having some kind of general context for what I was actually trying to achieve would have helped me a great deal as well.

    I have not written the guide yet. This is just the intro. I plan on doing a series of short tutorials that to get beginners up to speed on the basics of creating a distribution and how Dist::Zilla can be used to speed that process along.

[reply]
      an intro like mine would have really helped me make a clear distinction between what a module was and what a distribution was. These concepts were muddy for me.

      I guess from the phrasing here that you are nysus in disguise. Did you read How to make a CPAN Module Distribution in the Creating and Distributing Modules tutorials section? That makes the distinction pretty clear to me.

      Dist::Zilla is sorely lacking an entry-level tutorial or user guide. That's not to say that I would recommend its use for a first-time CPAN author - quite the opposite. It is the most arcane of all the module management systems and is aimed at (and IMHO only really useful for) the most prolific authors.

      You can write an intro to CPAN, modules and dists if you wish but there are plenty around already. It would save you time and effort just to refer to those and instead build on them by focusing on the nuts and bolts of Dist::Zilla and how it compares/contrasts with other options.

[reply]
        Dist::Zilla is sorely lacking an entry-level tutorial or user guide. That's not to say that I would recommend its use for a first-time CPAN author - quite the opposite. It is the most arcane of all the module management systems and is aimed at (and IMHO only really useful for) the most prolific authors.

        In my dream an entry-level tutorial or user guide could promote Dist::Zilla into exactly that: A recommended tool for a first-time (CPAN) module author. It doesn't matter how much magic it can do. Go for Simple problems can be solved easily, and hard problems can be solved.

[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom