[Catalyst] Google Summer of Code: mentors, projects

[Octavian Râsnita]

From: "Kieren Diment" <diment at gmail.com>
> I'm still keen on the idea of an easy Perl/Catalyst installer.   Something 
> that might encompass local::lib, PAR and deployable on the  three or four 
> main OSs  windows (strawberry perl), OS X (10.4 and  10.5, using the 
> system provided perl) and linux (maybe debian and red  hat based distros - 
> again using the system perl).  Also needs to work  in an environment with 
> no root/Administrator  access.   And a nice  "double click" installer at 
> the end would be good.  I've rigged up an  appalling hack to do this in 
> windows that needs finessed, but I  haven't looked at the other OSs.
>
> Mentoring?  Well, what I can offer is to point a student in the right 
> direction of who to talk to, not much else.  I'm also very tolerant of 
> stupidity being a somewhat mentally challenged programmer myself.

It is a great idea for promoting Catalyst!

A smart installer won't be necessary. I think a simple .tar.gz (or .zip) 
archive that contains all the modules which are not a part of the Perl 
distribution would be enough.

The user could unarchive the file in a certain location like
/home/user/Catalyst
or
C:\Catalyst

then he could create new apps using a command like
/home/user/Catalyst/bin/catalyst.pl MyApp
or
c:\Catalyst\bin\catalyst MyApp

This would create the app in the current directory and the app would need to 
also add /home/user/Catalyst/lib or c:\Catalyst/lib in @INC.

The user would be also able to "install" Catalyst under a server running 
Linux, create the apps under Windows and then he could archive the apps 
under Windows, upload them to the Linux server, unarchive them and run them.

Of course, the only out of the box solution for running the apps would be 
the CGI way, because for running the testing server or for configuring 
fastcgi or mod_perl would need root permissions, but I think this is the 
same in case of other frameworks.
(I don't know if using mod_php or mod_python requires the same permissions 
though...)

Octavian