Developers of Sympa

[Marc Chantreux <address@concealed>]

On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 05:35:51PM +0100, David Verdin wrote:
> >There is a gap between what we perl developpers consider as normal
> >sysadmin practices, and real world practices. And it has to be
> >balanced against the added value of additional dependencies if you
> >want to target real users. Here, that's clearly overkill.
> I agree with guillaume here. Even though I appreciate CPAN as a
> provider of all-purposes modules, we had a lot of reports overs the
> years of failed installation due to problems with CPAN.

I really miss this point: what is complicated in installing largely
tested CPAN packages like Package::Stash ? 

> Sysadmins just don't have the time to play with modules.

and they really don't need (as soon as sympa is shipped correctly with some
recommendations about deployment). maybe i should help here ? 

> The easier it is to install Sympa, the better.

right! (as i said: i'm in charge of those stuff at unistra). my dream
is to tape "cpan install Bundle::Sympa" from the shell to be sure that
all the sympa related perl stuff is ready to run.

> That's where you lost me. However, as much as I appreciate Marc's
> enthusiasm in participating to the projet, I again agree with
> Guillaume. We have a lot of things far more crucial than discussing
> development choices that were made 10 years ago. They are here and
> we must deal with them.

Just to be clear: adding dependencies is not a goal but if i come to
rewrite some code, i clearly prefer to write no code at all just using
the existing stuff.

maybe you should have a chat with some koha developpers for exemple:
they have exactly the same problems: 

* old and large codebase
* "real world" sysops

and they are comming back to the "staying away from CPAN" strategy which
is now one of the first reasons of koha bug tracking activity.

> ONCE Sympa 6.2 is beta, and we have merged Guillaume'work, we will
> have a lot of quiet time to discuss these topics.

sure: i wasn't trying to change everything and i'm just too young in the
project to have any good vision of what must be done. i just pointed to
a module that can avoid an AUTOLOAD strategy as i just read about it
used in sympa.

regards 
marc