Re: telling users how to get CPAN modules

It was interesting doing a Google search on my software, because I found that people had made Red Hat RPMs and Debian .deb files for my software. It would be great to just depend on each user community to do something like that, but what ends up happening is that, e.g., the latest .deb on the web is an older version with known bugs. I use FreeBSD myself, and it's not practical for me to create and test separate versions for every Linux distribution.

Try e-mailing the people who have made the rpms and debs, offer to host their packaging of your program if they keep it updated. Toss their package up and thank them on your downloads page, and you've just made an Internet friend for life (in addition to making your software easily accessible to more users).

You might be surprised how enthusiastic of a response you get from people, especially because they're obviously interested in your software. They also may have ideas on how to incorporate automatic building of rpm and deb files into your normal build process.

One more thing: I'd definitely learn how to use PAR to package the CPAN modules for your application, it will improve your Perl kung-fu greatly. :)

Comment on Re: telling users how to get CPAN modules

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Re: Re: telling users how to get CPAN modules by bcrowell2 (Friar) on Mar 21, 2004 at 03:16 UTC
Try e-mailing the people who have made the rpms and debs, offer to host their packaging of your program if they keep it updated. Yeah, that's probably a very sensible idea. One more thing: I'd definitely learn how to use PAR to package the CPAN modules for your application, it will improve your Perl kung-fu greatly. PAR looks cool, but it does look like it would require taking my perl-fu to the next level :-) I wonder if Perl 6 and Parrot will simplify this process at all. Even if PAR works great, it strikes me as kind of a bolted-on mechanism for something that might be better supported within the language itself. IIRC, Perl 6 will eliminate the problems with having to recompile XS when you upgrade perl; that will really be nice.	[reply]

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Re: Re: telling users how to get CPAN modules
by bcrowell2 (Friar) on Mar 21, 2004 at 03:16 UTC

Try e-mailing the people who have made the rpms and debs, offer to host their packaging of your program if they keep it updated.

One more thing: I'd definitely learn how to use PAR to package the CPAN modules for your application, it will improve your Perl kung-fu greatly.
PAR looks cool, but it does look like it would require taking my perl-fu to the next level :-) I wonder if Perl 6 and Parrot will simplify this process at all. Even if PAR works great, it strikes me as kind of a bolted-on mechanism for something that might be better supported within the language itself. IIRC, Perl 6 will eliminate the problems with having to recompile XS when you upgrade perl; that will really be nice.

[reply]