Noticing Perl stuff along the wire again

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 1:11 AM, Mark Anderson wrote:
> I'm with you 100% there. Whatever we do it should be properly planned. Let
> me dig though and put together a draft.
>
> On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 7:08 PM, Joshua Root wrote:
>
>> I don't really care what we do with perl as long as it works. I've done
>> way more work on the perl ports than I ever wanted to, simply because
>> they were broken and stopping other stuff from working.

I also agree. (But maybe keep support for Perl 6 as a separate port(?) in mind.)

What I would probably attempt to do (without claiming that it would
work) would be to keep a huge file ("database") with CPAN modules
(name, version, location, checksums, dependencies, ...) automatically
generated and updated with some cronjob. And then write "a bit" of
logic around that in the PortGroup + allowing developers to patch and
overwrite stuff when necessary / when things/modules/new versions
break.

While you are drafting all those things and thinking them through ...
I would really love to see integration of ruby's rvm and support for
multiple versions of rails in the future (for rails it is very
important to support older versions because the applications usually
only work with one version and not with others).

It's not perl, but it's a very similar problem with bundle
automatically installing exactly the right version of dependencies
etc. It's not really clear to me how the integration could/should be
done and I'm not asking you to write the code yet, but if you have
some suggestion, you might think along while solving the problems with
Perl.

Mojca