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Postings from August 2001
Re: The case for SDKs
From:
Adam Turoff
Date:
August 3, 2001 06:52
Subject:
Re: The case for SDKs
Message ID:
20010803095249.A25278@panix.com
On Fri, Aug 03, 2001 at 06:03:49AM -0700, Kurt D. Starsinic wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 03, 2001 at 11:42:48AM +0100, Matt Sergeant wrote:
> > So, should we kickstart this process?
>
> Let's. At the p5p meeting, somebody said that the idea that an SDK is
> just a Bundle was discussed and rejected. Could somebody summarize or point
> me towards that discussion?
Hmm...I still need to clean up those notes. :-(
From what I remember, here were the serious issues:
The Bundle approach doesn't capture versions of the included
modules, just the module names. An SDK version must be in a Known
Good State (tm) and should be versioned itself.
Bundles don't work because they're a quick hack at a meta
distribution. If someone downloads a 2K bundle file and goes
offline, they don't have all of the modules they need to
install (and can't throw that 2K bundle file around inside
the firewall effectively). This says to me that an SDK
needs to be a packaged version of a specific set of module
distributions (compressed or not) that comprise a specific
version of that SDK.
We probably want to take a page from the [x]emacs folks and
keep the SDKs alongside the core distribution on CPAN and
other such mirrors. There's the core emacs source + about 3-5
groups of additional packages, and emacs-sumo which contains
everything. Perhaps there's room for perl-5.8-web-1.3.tar.gz
alonside perl-5.8-win32-2.3.tar.gz, etc., which should be a
simple matter of packaging at distribution time (and repackaging
at SDK upgrade time).
There's an unresolved issue with DLL Hell; if two modules include
a common module (e.g. Date::Broken), SDK 1 may function with version
3.14, and SDK 2 may function with version 2.78, but both SDKs can't
be installed concurrently because of conflicting requirements with
that common module.
That's all I can remember. My notes are pretty messy from that discussion.
Z.