Alien is a horrible namespace choice. Yes I know it's been approved by Brian DFoy (cpan dungeon master) and his minions.

I think Damian Conway (perl feng shui master) would not approve. Namespaces should be descriptive. Could have been 'Notperl'.. who knows.. Alien?! Eek!

I think the 'Alien' concept stinks like system maintenance. I think this kind of thing is likely to work only on posix systems, and then.. there are better ways to install things if they are missing. I would be sketched out about having perl hacks to detect if you have things like rpm and yum. Yes, not that Alien decrees that.

By what I see of the Alien concept, you would have a Alien::MySQL which would detect if you have mysqld, mysql-devel mysql-client.. who knows--- before you install DBD::mysql.

It seems to me that detection is plenty help already. After that, it seems the likely people to be installing non-perl libraries would be admins. Yes, I know.. users can too.. Pfffttt.. users...

Users installing non-perl resources should probably not be given a perl hack to help them out with it ?

In reply to Re^2: Testing for non-perl system requirements by leocharre
in thread Testing for non-perl system requirements by leocharre

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