Releasing Bugzilla to CPAN

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On 03/31/2010 10:53 PM, Gabor Szabo wrote:
> I even blogged about this now:
> http://blogs.perl.org/users/gabor_szabo/2010/04/distributing-applications-via-cpan.html

	Hey Gabor. Thanks! I actually read your blog earlier today, even--I
have a Google Alert for the word "Bugzilla". :-)

	It looks like, from the comments, that CPAN is generally considered
pretty tough as a distribution mechanism for applications that end users
can actually use, though sometimes people do consider it somewhat worth
distributing source code via CPAN.

	The only web applications that sound like they've been successfully
distributed via CPAN are FastCGI applications, or pure mod_perl apps,
and Bugzilla is not a FastCGI application or purely a series of mod_perl
modules. It has many separate and individual .cgi files that are not
command-line-executable binaries, and it has a terrific number of static
files that must be directly accessible to the web server.

	Also, much like miyagawa mentions in the comments about Remedie and
github-growler, the target audience of Bugzilla is not Perl users, but
rather anybody who needs to do bug-tracking.

	I think that perhaps, in the future, if Bugzilla becomes a FastCGI
application, CPAN distribution would be more reasonable for end users.
But for now, I don't see a reasonable way to do it (see below for a bit
more about this).

> It would be very nice if you could take your time and comment on that
> blog explaining what do *you* see missing from the CPAN toolchain in order to make it easy to
> distribute Bugzialla and install it via CPAN.

	I don't think it's an issue of the CPAN toolchain. I can't imagine any
cross-platform automated distribution system that would properly install
Bugzilla, other than one which simply downloaded the tarball and
unzipped it into a directory. If you have some ideas about how to do
that well, then I'd be interested to hear them, but I'm not thinking of
any myself.

	Distro-specific packages are fine (at least theoretically) though,
because within one distro the package maintainers can make logical
decisions about how everything should go, based on how that distro
works. But I don't see a reasonable cross-platform distribution
mechanism other than our current "roll everything up in a tarball in a
single directory" method.

	-Max
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