Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have an open-source perl application that uses a bunch of modules (Tk, plus a bunch of miscellaneous stuff like Date::Calc, etc.). I wrote a little install script that automates the installation procedure on Unix -- basically it just does use CPAN; foreach $module(@modules) {install $module}

The thing is that I would like people to be able to run it on Windows or Pre-X MacOS, without making the installation process too much work. But I couldn't get CPAN's install routine to work on either of those non-Unix platforms. A naive user is going to have a hard time downloading 8 different packages and installing them all. Can anyone suggest a way to make this all simpler? Maybe it doesn't seem like a big deal to Linux users, but I spend a lot of time on MacOS X, and I'm spoiled by how good their software installation method is: drag the application (which is actually a directory with hidden contents) to the Applications folder, and you're done!

The only thing I can think of is to precompile any C code used by these modules, and then put all the Perl and compiled C into one huge platform-specific archive. Seems kinda silly to do this, since it makes my 55k download into 10 Mb, and I'd also have to keep up to date on the latest releases of all the modules. Plus it would be a lot of work ;-)

Thanks in advance, O Monks!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
(podmaster) Re: cross-platform install for naive users
by PodMaster (Abbot) on Apr 05, 2002 at 22:07 UTC
    I think you'd be better off just providing teachers with the service ;)

    buuut, if you want, for win32 at least, you can always 

    use PPM;
 PPM::InstallPackage("package" => $package, "location" => $location, "
+root" => $root);
 PPM::RemovePackage("package" => $package, "force" => $force);

    [download]
    instead of CPAN (I don't know about mac).

    Or, just offer ready-to-run-on-platform.tar.gz-if-you-have perl-installed, which would have all the modules and their dependencies for that particular package in the tarball, and would require no compiling (this'll work for mac or win, since unix is not a problem)
     

    Look ma', I'm on CPAN.

    ** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.
[reply]
[d/l]
      Hi Podmaster, I'm the original poster -- thanks for the suggestion! Ben
[reply]

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