ActiveState distribute binary versions of a selection of modules, most of the common ones - but not all of them - which they keep reasonably up to date. It's a relatively simple matter to install them (there's a perl script who's name I've forgotten, which downloads the packages and installs them). If you've actually purchased ActiveState you get a nice GUI which does the same thing as the script.

This would certainly be easier to use than RPM's (who wants to find the RPM's themself?!). And is also easier than using CPAN directly since the user/admin doesn't have to download the package, configure it then compile it.

In reply to the latter part of you message, perhaps take a page from Debian's book and have servers which automatically compile the packages on the server. Then when you install the package it also works out all the dependencies and installs those packages as well (and their dependencies etc).

I do see a major problem with this approach though, there are modules which you want to configure for each machine (location of libraries which it depends upon) which vary. This could be fixed by adding shared librarys to LD_LIBRARY_PATH or /etc/ld.so.conf.

If we could make some nice automated compilation/installation system that would be really neat. I think it's possible too...

In reply to RE: (jcwren) RE: (2) Getting managers to accept Perl modules by puck
in thread Getting managers to accept Perl modules by Fastolfe

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.