[Catalyst] Re: packaging and porting Catalyst

[Jonathan Rockway]

Bill Moseley wrote:
> But, who is the target of this effort?  I thought it was to help get
> past the often difficult process of installing Catalyst via CPAN.
> 
> Or is it to get providers, like Dreamhost, to include Catalyst in
> their offerings to their users?  Actually, for Dreamhost it might be
> more likely for them to offer it as one of their "one-click installs"
> which would likely be better as a tarball than a deb.

You bring up a good point, packages are irrelevant to people without
root.  I'm thinking that people rolling out exciting new Web 2.0 sites
are probably only a small portion of the Catalyst userbase.  To be
honest, I don't see Catalyst catching on in the $10/month hosting
category simply because the $10/month can't pay for the memory a
persistent process (like myapp_fastcgi.pl or mod_perl) requires.  You
might be able to get away with it on a case-by-case basis, but $10
hosting won't stay that price if Catalyst becomes a service that the
hosting company provides and supports.  (For $20/month, though, you can
get a "dedicated" virtual server and be fine.  In that case, you can
install packages, though, and that's what I/we are targeting.)

Of course, for every Dreamhost user there are many, many more users that
are creating Catalyst applications either for internal use or for paying
clients.  In this case, they have a sysadmin that runs their (on-site or
colocated) servers, and installing CPAN modules might not be something
the sysadmin is good at.  apt-get install Catalyst or "make install"
means that the sysadmin can have a known-good, supported environment for
deployment (and the developers can have the same environment on their
desktop).  Trust me, copying CPAN modules between machines is not fun.
It involves a little too much "cross your fingers and hope for the best"
for my tastes.

Anyway, my personal goal is to make it easy to deploy Catalyst apps on
OpenBSD, since I do that anyway :) If your goals are different, then I
look forward to your feedback and contributions.  If you need svn space,
just ask on the -dev list.

Regards,
Jonathan Rockway

-- 
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