Perl Modules [was: Bugzilla @ MySQL Conference - booth report]

[Dave Williss]

Jochen Wiedmann wrote:
> On 4/27/07, Max Kanat-Alexander <mkanat at bugzilla.org> wrote:
>
>>         Yes, and that's mostly because we come from a Linux background.
>> That is, to us it's natural to install a bunch of dependencies like
>> MySQL, Apache, and perl, because those will probably already be on our
>> systems anyway and if they're not, they're available through the
>> package manager.
>
> That used to be true. IMO, it is no longer the case with 3.0. Fetching
> and installing all those thousands of mail related modules to a
> machine without Internet access was a true night mare.
I know this was a hassle for us.  Our bugzilla is on a private LAN which 
is physically isolated from the Internet.  As far as distros eventually 
coming with the packages installed: this may be true, but you can't 
expect that somebody setting up bugzilla (or upgrading it) is going to 
install a new OS just so they have all the standard modules.  I expect 
the next time we upgrade to the next version of Bugzilla that there will 
be some new Perl module that we don't have on that machine.

I would like to see either a single .tar.gz that can be downloaded with 
Bugzilla which has the latest versions of all the Perl modules it 
depends on, or a page which lists the ones needed with links to the CPAN 
download site for each one.  At least that way, they're all in one place 
and easy to find.

I do like that the check setup script tells you up front all the modules 
you're missing.  For comparison, I was trying to build the latest 
version of Gnome this weekend, and every 15 min it stopped and told me I 
needed a new version of Python or ImageMagick or some library I'd never 
even heard of.