[Catalyst] Debian recommendation

[Evan Carroll]

I just wanted to buzz in and be slightly more explicit. Debian doesn't
understand Perl, and they don't care about CPAN. Debian hand-hacks
stuff in the most virulent and ridiculous fashion: they'll open up a
perl class, hack in an extra method, make random other methods die
explicitly, and then they'll make your system dependent on it. I use
CPAN too, and Debian as my primary distribution but that doesn't
change a thing. They could for instance, subclass a module for use by
the system into a ::Debian package, but instead they choose the dirty
hack-it-in method which makes life difficult for those of us who want
to simply get a job done. The Debian packages don't have to pass the
natural tests, they're not published under the same namespaces, they
don't change version numbers, and they're hardly sound improvements.

Debian will justify this because they want the system configured
through /etc, and not at the whim of each individual author, but
unfortunately that doesn't help us here, or people that depend on the
non-debian behavoir.

Use CPAN at your risk, it might work -- it might not. I do, and I feel
comfortable saying most programmers on this list can probably navigate
around the problems Debian creates, but for the end perl user, Debian
is a horrible platform.

-- 
Evan Carroll
System Lord of the Internets