Brian Ingerson (of Inline fame) has a couple of ideas on the subject that he explained at YAPC. It involves peer-to-peer distribution of (already compiled) modules, with a central repository storing only the MD5 for a module/system pair. this is very similar to what Napster does. This way you can get the "module distribution" from any registered user that has the same OS as you, and you can check that what you get is in fact similar to the distribution as registered in the central DB. That's pretty nifty.

The main problem to solve is how the first MD5 for a module distribution gets generated in the first place. At one point the system has to trust a (priviledged?) user.

The distribution process itself could be made transparent, a-la Inline, the first time you use a module, if it is not installed on your system the system goes out and gets it, already compiled.

The systeme could be name... NAPC (Brian had lots of cool accronyms for it, I liked NAPC Ain;t Perl's CPAN).

In reply to Re: The Future - Shipping Applications Written in Perl by mirod
in thread The Future - Shipping Applications Written in Perl by John M. Dlugosz

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