DBIx::Class for SQL hackers
Work in progress:
@public,perl,ironman
Under the palm tree: Under the palm tree (dbix-class-for-sql-hackers-1.html)
DBIx::Class for SQL Hackers (1)
History
I volunteered (or was nudged) to apply to get the Enlightened Perl Organisation's grant to document/write-up some material on using DBIx::Class for SQL Hackers. The idea is to show folks that traditionally use plain DBI in their Perl code, how to do the same queries and much more, using DBIx::Class.
Plan
- Grant proposal doc - DONE
Still waiting for Matt to look at this, or say something about it. Will assume for now that its all fine.. ;)
- User participation - TODO
I hope to post links to editable content via the EPO Wiki, helpfully both my blog/doc format and that of the Wiki are Markdown, so I can shunt things around easily.
- Tutorial update/conversion - TODO
The DBIC Tutorial is a long-time work-in-progress which I really need to get into a state/place where others can use and contribute to it. Is it a good idea to convert to markdown and then add sections on "from SQL" to complete the grant?
Introduction (Why ORMs and DBIx::Class)
Almost every sizable Perl application these days needs a method of long term data storage. When the data needs to be easily retrieved as well as stored, we often use a database. Most databases can be comfortably accessed using SQL. Using the DBI module, and a DBD for the particular database, we can write SQL in our Perl code, and retrieve the results as arrays or hashes.
## Example
my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:mydb.db");
my $sth = $dbh->select("SELECT artist.id, artist.name FROM artists");
$sth->execute;
my $results = $sth->fetchrow_arrayref({});
foreach my $row (@$results) {
print $row->{name};
}
There are several things we can do to make this code more usable, for example store the database connect string (DSN) in a configuration file so that users of the code can use different databases without editing the code. We can also write a separate method or module for creating and returning the $dbh, so that we don't create a lot of db connections unnecessarily.
The part we can't do much about is the SQL in the code. We can move it around, put it in libraries, but it's still there, somewhere.
Why would you not want SQL in your Perl code? For a start, it's just a string to pass to the database interpreter, there is no syntax checking at the Perl compilation level. Thus it fails late, not early. Your editor will also not syntax check what it just sees as strings of text.
Modern Perl should also leverage OO where it can. DBI is a low level library that gets things right, but returns plain hashes and arrays, not objects.
Perl ORMs still use DBI underneath, extending it to catch coding errors early (names of columns, SQL clauses), and to return the results as objects containing the database values, which work just like any other Perl object.
@public,perl,dbix-class
Under the palm tree: Under the palm tree (london_perl_workshop_2009.html)
London Perl Workshop 2009
Several days later, what do I remember from LPW 2009?
Piers' talk on New beginnings. Interestingly, it's mostly the structure of the talk that I remember, not the content. Only a few days before, Simon Cozens had pointed out a post of Yuval's, and specifically praised it as a post with good structure: Show where there is a problem, solve that problem with a particular coding technique (or technology), dont waffle too much. Simon was so impressed he posted a meta-post on the subject.
Pier's talk was about why he left Perl for Ruby, and why he came back again. Perl has some "boilerplate" code that one typically needs when writing all methods. Instead of declaring the methods incoming arguments, one has to explicitly pull them off of the argument array, @_. Piers returned because the Perl community has been solving this and similar annoyances. In this case with Devel::Declare. And it's not even a "source filter"!
Problem; Solution; Done.
Another talk I still remember is Andy Wardley's on Template Toolkit 3. It's been many years in the making, much like Perl 6^WRakudo. It's looking pretty good however, and much evolved. I made myself some TODO notes as he was talking. Andy's talk style was the opposite of Piers', so I will have to ask him later; What problems does TT3 solve (better, more elegantly) that TT2 doesn't? Why would I use it over TT2? He also zhas some ambitious ideas to add a C library so that it can be used from other programming languages. This is another good way to spread good things that come from Perl.
That's it, most of the rest is a blur. Hallway chats, hot drinks, food, books. O'Reilly were there with a table as usual, with 35% off usual prices, so I bought "Beautiful Teams" to add to my collection of projecty books.
It was good to see friends again, to actually talk to people outside the confines of IRC. I came away somewhat more motivated to join in non-work projects than of late.
So much so that I've picked up on the EPO grants again. Having been voted on, decided, had money assigned and then listed.. They've been sitting there idle, waiting for someone to speak up and offer to complete them. Maybe its a lesson in time management, these things don't run themselves, mebbe volunteers need to be able to dedicate X amount of hours per day/week to help. Oops, minor side-rant, I'll go and write that proposal now, and assign myself time to work on it!
@diary, public, perl, lpw2009
Under the palm tree: Under the palm tree (ironman-update.html)
IronMan Update
No really, not just because I've not posted anything in.. a while. I got bored reading mst's mbox of ironman stuff, converting blog urls into atom/rss feeds, and typing the results into Plaggers yaml configuration file.
So I replaced all those manual entries with:
- module: Subscription::DBI
config:
schema_class: 'IronMan::Schema'
connect_info: ['dbi:SQLite:/home/castaway/plagger/subscriptions.db']
And wrote one of these to convert the existing junk:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use YAML 'LoadFile';
use Data::Dumper;
use Data::UUID;
use IronMan::Schema;
my $yamlfile = shift;
my $dsn = shift;
my $yaml_dump = LoadFile($yamlfile);
my $schema = IronMan::Schema->connect($dsn);
my ($sub_conf) = grep { $_->{module} eq 'Subscription::Config' }
@{ $yaml_dump->{plugins} };
print Dumper($sub_conf);
my $feeds = $sub_conf->{config}{feed};
my $uuid = Data::UUID->new();
foreach my $feed (@$feeds) {
print "Feed: $feed->{url}\n";
my $fdb = $schema->resultset('Feed')->find_or_new({ id => $uuid->create_str, %$feed}, { key => 'url' });
if($fdb->in_storage) {
print "... already exists\n";
next;
}
$fdb->insert;
}
The twiddly part was setting up an app (form) for people to sign up, which now exists in the ironman repo, and runs on my local box, at the moment.
Thoughts of things to add:
- Make the config for the app and the one for plagger use the same info for the database dsn?
- Confirm signup by sending an email including a link back to the app using the guid of the signup.
- Allow users to edit/remove their feeds using the guid/email key.
- ??
- Profit
Someone also needs to make the thing prettier!
Btw to install, symlink the css and image dirs from "plagger/assets/plugins/Publish-PagedPlanet/default/static" to the catalyst "root" dir.
@public,perl,ironman
Under the palm tree: Under the palm tree (making-a-difference.html)
Making a difference
I failed in the end, to Reproduce my URI problem, but that hasn't deterred me from helping to improve random parts of CPAN in general.
Recently I've been struggling with Crypt::RSA. It's API is not all that complicated, however a small typo caused me quite a bit of grief. A typo in my own code, misspelling one of the argument names for the verify function.
I had this:
$rsa->verify(
Messsage => $mess,
Key => $key,
Signature => $signature
);
Spot the problem? It took me ages, and some perl -d debugging, to realiase that Crypt::RSA happily attempts to verify an empty (undef) message. It didn't use warnings, or check it's arguments, so my extra "s" in message wasn't noticed.
I reported the problem to the author, using CPAN's RT installation, which is available to all modules, as Bug #46577.
The author responded rapidly, understood my problem, improved his code, and uploaded a new release to CPAN. You can see the fixes using the CPAN diff tool: Diff from Crypt-RSA-1.98 to Crypt-RSA-1.99. Yay!
The second (actually chronologically first) fix was related to my mumble about XML::Atom::SimpleFeed, on a previous blog entry. Aristotle got in touch with me to say "That shouldn't happen, is all sane" .. But eventually James proved him wrong with a patch including a test case, and a new release of that appeared too.
@public,perl,crypt-rsa,xml-atom-simplefeed
Under the palm tree: Under the palm tree (are-we-going-to-need-it.html)
Are we going to need it?
Odd flash of inspiration while washing up (yay for mindless activity) and also listening to a TED talk.
I often grumble at Moose. Though not actually at Moose itself, just at seemingly everyone and everything jumping on the bandwagon. I also want to use Reaction, cos Matt wrote/writes it, and from the outside it feels like a great idea.
But part of me doesn't think so. I think I know why now. Maybe I've been reading too many articles on Agile and so on. Specifically the principles of DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork, and YouAintGonnaNeedIt.
Reaction is a complex piece of software, built on top of two other pieces of complex software, Catalyst, and Moose. That's a whole stack of code. As people jokingly say "It installs half of CPAN". Don't get me wrong, software re-use is good and if I actually needed a piece of software that does all the many things that these three do, I'd use them.
But I don't. Applications (and websites) don't often start complex, they gather complexity over time.
For one or two web pages, maybe even ten, I can write them by hand. Ok so I probably copy the header and footer after a few. When I come to write the eleventh one, this becomes tedious. So instead I could use something like Template Toolkit's ttree, to produce a bunch of pages out of some templates. At some point I find myself needing something dynamic, or the concept of users, then I may go fetch Catalyst.
And that's as far as I've got. Which step makes me need Reaction? The one where 90% of my website is interactive? I've not written too many of those, but the few I have, Catalyst has sufficed.
You're probably thinking now, that I just don't write the same kind of applications/websites as others do. Thats possibly true.
But again, Agile ways of doing things suggest we write the minimal amount of code we can get away with, to imlement the currently required features. That we don't plan ahead and add more code for potential features later, they will be re-thought anyway. That we release early, and often, and gather feedback for improvement, and then add new features.
Not forgetting to refactor. To upgrade, to replace the entire framework if needed.
To be practical
I think, what I'm looking for is, a guide for newcomers to explain and help ths progression. How to upgrade your site or code, from a few pages, to some dynamic bits, to a full blown interactive site. Or even not, not every site wants or needs to go that far. Not all code needs to be able to use email.
There seem to exist many articles on how to write this complex code, but not enough that explain how to come to the conclusion that you need it.
Maybe this is also why there are still many many more people writing about how to do CGI scripts in Perl, than how to use Moose. The transition is missing.
(With thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity)
Right, now I'm off to move the fledgling DBIx::Class website from some hand written pages to ttree.
@public,programming,perl,thinking
Under the palm tree: Under the palm tree (blog_update.html)
Blog Update
It's been a while (4 months) since I created this blogging software, and I'm still happy with it. I've made a few updates to the code since I originally posted. So I thought I'd post an update.
I didn't post the RSS last time, so here's the current copy:
package Blog::RSS;
use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Atom::SimpleFeed;
use File::Grep 'fgrep';
use Path::Class;
use Data::Dumper;
use Text::Markdown 'markdown';
use DateTime;
use Template;
use DateTime::Format::W3CDTF;
use Apache2::Const;
sub handler
{
my $r = shift;
my $filedir = dir($r->dir_config('files'));
my $feed = XML::Atom::SimpleFeed->new(
title => $r->dir_config('blog_title'),
link => $r->dir_config('blog_link'),
id => $r->dir_config('blog_id'),
author => $r->dir_config('author'),
);
## All articles which are public, and not in-progress (~, .# etc)
my @articles =
fgrep { /\@.*public/ }
map { "$_" }
sort {
($a->stat->ctime <=> $b->stat->ctime) or
($a->stringify cmp $b->stringify)
}
grep { !$_->is_dir && $_->stringify =~ m{.*/[-\w]+\.txt$} }
$filedir->children;
@articles = @articles[-18 .. -1];
# print STDERR Dumper(\@articles);
my $macros = $r->dir_config('macros');
my $tt = Template->new({
ABSOLUTE => 1,
# ENCODING => 'utf8',
# WRAPPER => $wrapper,
PRE_PROCESS => $macros,
# INCLUDE_PATH => $filedir
});
foreach my $art (@articles) {
next if(!$art->{count});
my $f = file($art->{filename});
(my $fname = $f->basename) =~ s/\.txt$/.html/;
my $dt_formatter = DateTime::Format::W3CDTF->new();
my $dt_updated = DateTime->from_epoch(epoch=> $f->stat->ctime);
## Assuming we always put all the tags on one line
my ($category_line) = fgrep { /^\@.*public/} "$f";
$category_line = (values %{ $category_line->{matches} })[0];
chomp($category_line);
my @categories = split(/,/, substr($category_line, 1));
my $tt_processed ='';
my $fh = $f->openr();
binmode($fh, ':utf8');
$tt->process($fh, { photouri => $r->dir_config('blog_photo_base') }, \$tt_processed);
## According to the spec "author" is picked up from the header if not in
## the entry. Not all atom parsers do this (see plagger!)
$feed->add_entry(
title => "Under the palm tree ($fname)",
link => file($r->dir_config('blog_link'), $fname)->stringify,
id => 'http://desert-island.me.uk:8888/~castaway/blog/' . $fname,
content => markdown($tt_processed),
updated => $dt_formatter->format_datetime($dt_updated),
author => $r->dir_config('author'),
(map { (category => $_) } @categories),
);
}
## XML::Atom::SimpleFeed outputs as us-ascii without asking!
# $r->content_type('application/atom+xml;charset=UTF-8');
$r->content_type('application/atom+xml;charset=us-ascii');
$feed->print;
return OK;
}
1;
I've just (literally minutes ago) added some extras: The link/id/author texts were in the code, I moved them into the apache location section, so now (in theory) I could have multiple blogs with different names and ids.
I also added categories (tags), which I'd failed to do originally. I caught myself mumbling at Ironman users who miss them out, then complain that their entries don't show up, so I guess I should tag my own entries!
Since there are a fair few entries now, I've added sorting and reduced the output to the most recent twenty. I hope that's enough to give new users something to read, while reducing the overall server load somewhat.
A recent entry contains a GBP currency symbol (\xA3), which as you'll note, shows up ok on the actual entry page, but not in the RSS. I tried to fix this, but as you see from my note, XML::Atom::SimpleFeed outputs it's XML as "us-ascii" no matter what the user may want. So I may have to go nudge Aristotle with a patch sometime soon.
Also I need to go patch or nudge the [File::Grep]((http://search.cpan.org/dist/File-Grep) author, as the docs claim "fgrep returns an array of matches", but actually it returns a hashref of data.
I did get around to adding images a while ago, an image can now be linked as a public thumbnail to another of my softwares, PhotoOp, using a TT macro.
Here's the apache config:
<Location /~castaway/blog>
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler Blog::Handler
PerlHandler Blog::RSS
PerlSetVar files /mnt/nessie/projects/gtd/stikkit/
PerlSetVar wrapper /mnt/nessie/projects/blog/wrapper.html
PerlSetVar macros /mnt/nessie/projects/blog/macros.tt
PerlSetVar author 'Jess Robinson'
PerlSetVar blog_title 'Under the palm tree'
PerlSetVar blog_link 'http://desert-island.me.uk/~castaway/blog'
PerlSetVar blog_id 'http://desert-island.me.uk/blog'
PerlSetVar blog_photo_base 'http://desert-island.me.uk:5005'
</Location>
TODO
- Atom feed in UTF-8
- CPANize?
@public,perl,blog
Under the palm tree: Under the palm tree (software-diy.html)
Software DIY
At work, we have a bunch of in-house written, from-scratch (more or less), software. As we're a software house, this isn't terribly surprising, you might think.
However the software I'm talking about isn't the stuff we sell. It's the basic code that holds up the website. There's an entire self-written CMS, forms system, publishing system and a host of other things. Most of this stuff evolved, from simple CGI scripts written years ago, relying on text files and databases and so on. Some of those .cgi scripts even still exist in remote corners.
Larger and frequently used systems have been refactored into more hands-off tools, optimised for minimal maintenance.
Smaller systems languish, seemingly not enough used to refactor and improve. And yet they waste the time of us workers, more than we'd like.
Managements idea is to replace everything with some off-the-shelf pre-written software, and all will be good. This is of course somewhat of a pipe-dream, one which the people actually running that project are quite aware of. It will need customising, of course.
So there's two extremes: Software we've written from scratch, and software we just install, or pay for hosted. Where is the in-between layer? I'm thinking what we need more of is mostly-done solutions, components. Things like Catalyst plugins and similar come close, but even those are often self-contained. How do I integrate, for example, MojoMojo (wiki) and Angerwhale (blog) so that both use the same user source? Ok, those are both classed as complete applications, but that's my problem. I want them as parts of a whole.
Anyway, all this rambling, what I actually want to get started on is:
We have a system for writing forms, another one that builds a calendar of events, and a third that stores training courses and their dates/prices. None of these integrate with the other, and they're all updated by hand, that is, by programmers, not by people running the events/trainings.
After stumbling around the internet for a while looking for a plausible off-the-shelf solution, I decided to just write one (this is how frustrating finding software has become..) I did find a couple of not too terrible sounding ones, but they appear to be all hosted. For eg: Tendenci, which is actually part of a CMS.
So far I've managed to write a simple (i.e. not terribly normalised, but sufficient to reproduce existing systems) DB schema, and a somewhat bare Catalyst app. Now I need to make an admin interface/controller, and one to actually display the events list and the sign-up forms.
@public,perl,ironman
Under the palm tree: Under the palm tree (club-la-costa-timeshares.html)
Club La Costa timeshares
We went to Bristol last weekend.
After filling out a "Do you like holidays?" survey from a guy standing around outside B&Q in Swindon a week or two ago, we received a phone call telling us we'd won a holiday. To also get some vouchers to spend (M&S, Debenhams or similar), we should call another number in the next 20mins (before 7:45pm, this was about 7:20). So, nothing ventured, nothing gained, I did. I quoted the code I'd been given, verified (again) our approximate age and total income (over \xA325k) and was told the holiday was completely free, we only had to go to a presentation lasting up to 2 hours, in Bristol.
We had a pick of dates/times, they do them 11am and 3pm all days but
Monday/Tuesday, so we picked Sunday, 3pm. That being a time we could
actually make.
The venue was the Club La Costa offices, in Queens Square. The documentation we were sent contained a nice map, with good directions and mention of a local NCP car park which we used.
We arrived an hour early, intending to shop/look around. Didn't
actually find any shops, but the floating harbour area, (near the
Watershed media centre) has a fair number of eating places and some
street vendors, where James bought a hat.
On to Club La Costa. Entered the building and were escorted upstairs by a lady waiting for victims/entrants. We filled out yet another form confirming ages, income, lack of membership in any existing holiday companies, etc.
Then we talked to a nice guy named Julian. For the next 3.5 hours (or so). There were breaks for watching introductory videos, and chats to managers (who seem to be needed to confirm/explain anything involving actual money).
This is their deal: Holiday accommodation, when booked individually year by year, is expensive. The most expensive part of any holiday (they claim). Members of the club (75,000 people can't be wrong), pay a lump sum over N years, for the privilege of a weeks free accommodation anywhere that Club La Costa own resorts. In our case this would be just under \xA310k over 10 years. Or, in the trial they were actually offering, just under \xA34k over 3 years, or \xA3110.97/month. (Or \xA31331.66/year, for those without calculators handy).
Let me repeat that. One week, accommodation only. In what admittedly looks like very nicely kept ("we upgrade them every three years"), apartments. Fully fitted. In this day and age its even any week you like (1-52), and any location. Location that CLC owns, that is. Which is currently 36 in 11 countries (or some similar number).
So what's the catch?
First, there's a maintenance fee. \xA3495/year (\xA341.25/month), to pay for all those upgrades. This amount is revised every three years.
Second, it's limited to those 36 locations, unless you want to exchange your week for one at RCI. RCI are not a club, they don't own anything, they just swap weeks between various holiday clubs. Not a bad idea, they can offer thousands of locations across many countries. This exchange costs a fee. UK/Europe is currently \xA3128, and Worldwide \xA3169 (? not certain of this number any more).
Third, extra weeks. You can have them, the cost depends on the location you are booking. Ranging from \xA399 (UK/Europe) to \xA3450 (Worldwide).
Fourth, lack of escape. You've signed a contract to pay the lump sum over N years. To the question of "what happens if we can't pay, lose job etc" the answer is "well you could sell it back at a loss I suppose".
We said, for the purposes of discussion, we said could probably spare around \xA3150/month from our usual budget, to pay for holidays. Holidays, not just accommodation. After spending 110 of that on one single weeks accommodation, oops, 150 since there's also the maintenance fee.. We'd be left with, 0 to spend on flights/travel, food, the inevitable gifts and keepsakes.
So we walked away, with a \xA325 M&S voucher and a voucher for a free holiday. "Free" holiday, that is \xA329.50 each (up to 4 people), booking fee, plus airport taxes+fees should we choose the European choices instead of the UK ones. To achieve this holiday we have 14 days (7 now) to return it listing choices of UK or Spain/Portual/Tenerife and a selection of 4 dates in the next 18months (and at least 3 months from now).
Oh, and a hat, and \xA39 in parking fees.
@public,timeshares
Under the palm tree: Under the palm tree (reproducing-the-bug.html)
URI: Reproducing the bug
Last week I talked about contributing to the URI Perl module to fix the bug I think I've found.
Eagle-eyed among you will notice that I didn't actually include any data in my example. So the first thing I need to do is reproduce the possible bug reliably, on the latest edition of the code. The reason I didn't yesterday is that I couldn't find an example, typically, it's probably buried back in one of the old Apache error logs from a few weeks ago.
After attempting to do this for a while, I've found I can't reproduce it at all. Very odd, but not uncommon. I guess I was doing something rather silly (repeatedly).
This is what testing is for, so I shall leave this endeavour for now and talk about something new.
@public,perl,uri,ironman
Under the palm tree: Under the palm tree (open-source-is-not-free.html)
Open Source is not free
This is a bit of a meta-post, but bear with me.
Quite often Open Source software is written in people's spare time. Even folks who manage to make a living from customising, installing and supporting open source tools, also contribute in their "spare time". (I put this in quotes because, essentially that work time and spare time meld into one another, such that its hard to tell one from the other).
In the interests of not leaving people out, I'll also mention that so is a lot of not-open-source software, people write tools/apps/games to sell as well (see the iphone apps service).
What is spare time? The definitionn I'm using says its time that isn't paid for by an employer. Time that the person can choose to spend however they wish.
I and many other people I know choose to spend that time not only writing and contributing to, but also supporting open source (monetarily free) software. We do it because we enjoy helping people get on, because we want the software to be used, and so on.
Eventually, to my point: Supporting people is not free, it comes at the cost of supporting other people, or writing more documentation and software. If supporting one person wastes time because they don't help to find the answer themselves, or can't provide actual code that illustrates their problem, and so on, that's time wasted that could have helped other folks with clearer problems.
Similarly, writing software is not free. Writing solutions for other people, implementing their code, comes at the cost of writing code for everyone.
While I'm at it, adminning open source software websites and systems isn't free either. Configuring installs, updating planet configs, making icons and css. All this doesn't take seconds.
Looking back at the last couple of weeks, I'm amazed at how much time I haven't spent doing what I would actually prefer in my spare time (supporting users). Yet it needs doing, if we don't build up and contribute to the community, it doesn't exist. Now if Matt can start another rant about redesigning/upgrading perl-community websites, I wonder how much of that would also get done.
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
@public,perl,ironman
Under the palm tree: Under the palm tree (contributing-to-URI.html)
Contributing to URI
There I was, the other week, attempting to solve a problem in my app. I was attempting to construct a URI consisting of the previous set of query parameters and my applications base uri.
my $uri = URI->new($ENV{REQUEST_URI};
$uri->query("");
my $queryparams = join('&', map { "${_}=" . join("&${_}=", @{ $back_data{$_} } ) } keys(%back_data));
$uri->query($queryparams);
But I kept getting odd escaping errors for some reason:
Undefined subroutine &URI::Escape::escape_char callled at /nethomes/jessrobinson/local/perl-linux/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/URI/_query.pm
I tried upgrading to the latest release of URI from CPAN, but it still errored. So I worked around the problem and moved on.
Later on I went back and looked at URI on CPAN. I looked at the reported bugs, via the "View/Report Bugs (14)" link on that page. It's an oft used module, and yet has a small pile of open bugs. Mine is not among them, now I have several options:
- Report my bug and move on.
- Write a test for my bug, report it and move on.
- Write a test, and attempt to solve the problem, and contribute to the project.
It looks like the author, Gisle Aas, does keep up with, or at least comment on, some of the open bugs. Maybe he's just also quite busy.
I asked about on IRC whether Gisle was about there, he's not, but I was told that he stores all his modules on github, so now I can can grab the current source code to check my bug against.
@public,perl,uri,ironman
Under the palm tree: Under the palm tree (enlightened-cpan-tool.html)
The Enlightened CPAN Tool
The need for a ..
After my last post, and having discovered that The Enlightened Perl Organisation/EPO were in fact attempting to do part of what I described, I joined up to help them herd cats. So now I'm part of the Extended Core Working Group. Has a fancy name doesn't it?
Enlightened Perl is about improving the public face of Perl, and thus encouraging companies to use it.
They have a Wiki, which doesn't have terribly much on it yet. What it does have is a list of Issues, which I read, and then tweaked a bit. The item that stuck out the most to me, was the one about CPAN not being a good tool for seasoned professionals (or in general). Why not, and why CPANPLUS isn't either, wasn't mentioned. So here's my guess as to the reasons, and some ideas for ways of solving it.
CPAN and CPANPLUS do their jobs pretty well, however those jobs are quite Perl-centric. They just build and install Perl modules and their Perl dependencies. I think what we need is something that integrates better with existing package management systems (e.g. dpkg, rpm, emerge).
Before you say "But CPANPLUS has a thingy to build .deb files!" keep listening.. I said to James, "How well do you know aptitude" and from there we discussed for an hour or so.
My initial idea was that what we need is a tool that is similar to aptitude, in that it would visually display the available packages, their dependencies and so on. The thing would then install the module, AND interact with the actual package management system of whatever OS it was on, and convince it that that module was installed. It would need several backends, for dpkg, rpm and so on.
As for figuring out actual real dependencies, for example XML::LibXML requires libxml to be installed, the tool maintainers would initially run their own CPAN server, and enhance the META.yaml or packages files to contain this info.
James however had a much better idea for the frontend. Instead of writing our own frontend, it would be saner to have the server serve the appropriate types of packages for various package managers. E.g. for dpkg, a service that can be added to /etc/apt/sources.list. And if necessary, build packages on the fly, for requested modules.
It would probably be easier to start with a subset of CPAN distributions, say for example, the one that EPO-EC decides to support.
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