[Catalyst] Is it normal to have lots of trouble installing catalyst?

[Joe Landman]

FWIW: We build a separate tree for our application and load perl and 
modules there.  That said, I had somewhat of a difficult time with 
Catalyst at first due to dependency issues.  Module::Build was/is a 
problem.  The CPAN Task::Catalyst install didn't work when I tried it, 
but this wasn't a Catalyst issue as much as it was a Module::Build 
bugginess.  The problem is that bugs early in the dependency chain have 
a cascading and decidedly negative affect upon installers.

What we did to get it working is hand trace all the dependencies that 
failed, and integrate that into our build system (one large make file 
for Modules).  We cannot use CPAN/CPANPLUS due to (often) lack of 
network access to the outside world where we install.  That is not an 
option for dependency resolution for us.

With all the modules in the makefile, in approximately the right order, 
a quick "make" builds them all (takes some time) and installs them.

Unfortunately this is fairly static, so we are still using 5.61.  I am 
hoping that the dependency chain doesn't keep exploding, as it makes 
this job harder and harder.  We could snapshot the CPAN tree (3GB!!!) 
and install locally, configuring the site to pull from there.  We have 
done this in a few cases, but it is still somewhat of a problem.  Our 
entire build environment with all tarballs takes less than 50 M.  I have 
trouble requiring 60x this size just for an install.

Just my thoughts.

I want to invert this a little though.

After using Catalyst, the pain of dealing with the dependency radius 
was, in our opinion, worth it.

We came from a pure HTML::Mason to Catalyst and Mason, and it has made a 
significant difference in our coding and application quality (IMO), as 
well as significantly accelerated what we could do.  It is enabling us 
to consider things that were much harder before hand.  Mason is very 
good, one of the best at doing what it does.  It was hard for me to 
integrate the logic into the presentation like that and have anything 
like a reasonable application flow.  I find it much easier in catalyst.

Joe



Bernard FRIT wrote:
> 2006/2/8, Jesper Krogh <jesper at krogh.cc>:
> 
>>I have quite alot Ubuntu packages generated (dh-make-perl). If anyone is
>>willing to host them and/or tutor me to fix eventual problems in them,
>>then I'd be happy to share. (some for i386 most for amd64)
>>
>>The Catalyst installation I'm using has been installed by generating
>>debian packages of everything and installing that way. Worked flawless
>>but took some time. (had to traverse dependencies by hand).
> 
> 
> I was unable to install Catalyst on an Ubuntu laptop, first because
> Unbuntu's perl was threaded perl and didn't work for some of the
> packages I use (Ima::DBI I think) and then because of the
> inconsistency of cpan's depencies.
> 
> Now, I use to rsync the whole /usr/lib/perl5 branch between my
> development server and any machine I want to install Catalyst on. I
> just have to be sure that the same perl version is used. To be sure I
> am currently compiling a perl 5.8.7 from CPAN on any new machine, just
> setting up the same configuration.
> 
> I know that's a bit rough, but it works and it's fast. I couldn't
> handle anymore spending hours to resolve dependencies issues from
> cpan.
> 
> Hope that helps (hhmmm use at your own risks... ;-)
> --
> Bernard FRIT
> 
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-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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