Dimi Paun wrote:
On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 02:15 +0200, Francois Gouget wrote:
So there's really no point to focus on Locale::gettext.pm.
You are right, all these dependencies are crazy.
First, perl modules are evil. They are outside the packaging system, and I had only pain and suffering from them.
I don't understand this argument 'perl modules are outside the packaging system'. When I installed the po4a package on my Debian system it automatically installed all the required packages.
Of course here we are not installing a package but using the source directly so the packaging system won't take care of the dependencies for us. But that would be just as true for Wine: Wine's configure will tell you that you're mising the OpenGL library, that you don't have any sound library, and the X development environment is missing. But then you will be on your own to identify the needed packages. Just the same as with any missing perl module.
Maybe you were referring to CPAN which is a perl-specific alternate solution to packages. In that case I agree, I don't like it either and just don't use it.
When I looked for packages providing some of the needed dependencies I had no problem finding all the Debian packages. The trick there is there's a URL where you can give the name of a file and it gives you the name of the required package even if it is not installed. SUSE's Yast2 provided much the same ability. Mandrake's packaging was a bit more primitive but would at least let me search for packages by name so with a bit of guessing I made some progress. However the RedHat / Fedora Core package manager was awfully inadequate, offering no search functionality at all (<flame>they probably think the dumbed-down categories remove the need for it</flame>). In fact I did not find *any* perl package listed in RedHat's package manager! (<gripe>It also forced me to switch CDs >10 times when I tried installing the DocBook stuff, and to add insult to injury it would give me an error if I did not manually umount the CD after inserting it and before letting the packaging system look for stuff on it!</gripe>) The crux is that, while I was able to find the packages needed for SUSE, I had no such luck with RedHat / Fedora Core and only very limited luck with Mandrake. But maybe this is just because I don't know the magic URL like the one I used for Debian. IOW maybe someone more familiar with Mandrake / RedHat / Fedora Core can find more packages than I did.
[...]
Third, the SGML tools are already a big pain. Multiplying it 10 fold is not a step forward. We need to find a way to deal with this, and I'd much rather have a self-contained po4a.
I'd prefer po4a to be as self-contained as possible too. I'll ask about that on the po4a mailing list (and cross-post).