[Catalyst] Re: packaging and porting Catalyst

[Bill Moseley]

On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 11:51:10AM -0600, Jonathan Rockway wrote:
> 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.

Seems logical.  I'm running a few test apps under fastcgi with
Dreamhost on their $8/month 200GB disk, 2TB Transfer/month plan.
Hard to imagine many users on the same machine doing that at the same
time.  One day I saw this:

$ w
06:36:40 up 12 days, 13:48, 12 users, load average: 814.81, 444.90, 190.09

Dreamhost support claims that was a problem now fixed (and indeed
things are running faster), but can't imagine shared hosting for
anything important.


I also installed a Cat application on a dedicated server (managed by
Dreamhost) -- and even there I preferred to install locally.  Besides
the fact that there were not packages available, it gave me a way to
have most of my dependencies in once place.  I don't trust Dreamhost
to not "manage" away something important.

> 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).

I would hope a sysadmin could unpack a tarball.  But, for me, it comes
down to where I want my dependencies installed.  I'd rather that they
are installed with the application.


> 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.

For pure perl modules?

> 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.

I would love to have up to date packages.  I much prefer to apt-get
than use CPAN. My comment was that since much of the dependencies are
pure perl that it might be easier to keep one cat-in-a-box
type tarball up to date than try and keep a collection of packages for
different operating systems up to date.  Plus, it's not limited to
those with root.

It was just nice being able to untar my perl lib on my new Dreamhost
account and have my application work within a few minutes instead of
having to deal with the CPAN install troubles again.

-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org