[Catalyst] Kudos and thanks

[Danny Warren]

Ashley wrote:
> I haven't installed Catalyst from scratch since… I don't know, 2006, I 
> think. I have reinstalled or installed parts of it many times on many 
> platforms and that first full installation was the only one that didn't 
> cause me some kind of problem, sometimes the kind that takes a couple 
> hours to work out. I wrote an early review of Cat back then, still on 
> the frameworks homepage, that raved in part about how easy it was to 
> install. A couple months, and a couple of arguments on the list about 
> growing installation issues, later I was starting to wish I could take 
> back some of the review.
> 
> I just installed Catalyst::Runtime and Catalyst::Devel from scratch on a 
> brand new MacBook/Leopard without any modifications to the environment 
> (well, Xcode but that's required for development) or the CPAN or 
> anything and they both went in (while following prereqs) without a 
> single hitch.
> 
> I really don't enjoy sysadmin stuff and I begrudge every lost weekend 
> I've spent trying to recompile Apache with modperl, etc, etc. This was 
> just completely fantastic. Made me fall in love with Perl and Cat and 
> recapture the same feeling I had when I first reviewed Catalyst more 
> than two years ago.
> 
> Thanks again to everyone who has worked on making the various pieces and 
> making the various piece go.

Thank you for this.  I had to do a fresh deployment a few weeks ago and 
had the exact same thought.

It also didn't occur to me until just now that the "help I am going in 
circles trying to install this thing" posts have all but disappeared 
from here.

Another thing that never gets a lot of due are the excellent dispatch 
scripts, which I am now completely spoiled by.  Every other framework I 
have played with seems to have wildly different script behaviors, and 
seem to have one specific flavor (fcgi vs mod_perl vs dev server, etc) 
that works the best and is pushed over others.

Catalyst seems to behave how I expect it to no matter how I talk to it, 
which frees me up to pick the method that works best for the place I 
need to put it.  At this point I only do a final smoke test with the 
actual deployment parameters before a milestone release, as I just trust 
that an instance of a dev server will behave just like an fcgi socket 
will by now.

So...thanks everybody!