[Catalyst] What a waste of time

[Toby Corkindale]

rails coder wrote:
> Asterisk devs are using the same "consulting ware" business model.. the
> documentation is incredibly poor to non-existant, and none of them will
> share their setups with you. There is always this attitude that "I spent
> months/years learning/developing this thing, it doesn't hurt you to
> spend months/years learning how to use it via trial and
> error/humiliation/newbie pecking order/whatever... When they write a
> decent book, I will buy it. I don't have months of free time to waste
> learning by trial and error.

I've used plenty of packages that are meant to be "Good" which have had
far worse documentation than Catalyst. Prototype and Tridion come to mind.

As a Catalyst user, I would say that the documention is the worst part
of the project though. The number of times I've had to figure things out
"the hard way" annoys me. Last example that comes to mind? The YAML
configloader plugin - there's more documentation in the catalyst
tutorial (or was it intro) than there was in the plugin itself.
(See perldoc Catalyst::Plugin::ConfigLoader::YAML)

> On top of all that, the catalyst installation still sucks ass, even if
> one can manage to do it sucessfully.\

That's completely false. On Gentoo, I mounted the catalyst portage
overlay and typed "emerge catalystframework" and went and made a coffee.
No interaction required, no problems, and the end results "just works".


-Toby
(posting from work address)