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!

In reply to cross-platform install for naive users by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.