[tsuraan]

CPAN (and the arguably failed attempts to copy it by other language communities)

I haven't used perl, but I do use ruby and I'm learning haskell. What does CPAN do that make rubygems and cabal failures? They both work really well from what I can see (especially cabal), but since I don't know perl, my POV is obviously limited. What am I missing out on?

[Ingaz]

Hackage, rubygems, PyPi - are all modeled after CPAN

[tsuraan]

Right, modeled after, but I'm wondering why they would be considered failures. Rubygems and cabal both work really well for me, and cabal is both the nicest package management system and the nicest build system I've ever used. I'd love to know why somebody would call it a failure.

[zaphar]

You obviously have never tried to compile profiling binaries for a haskell I would not call cabal the nicest build system I had used. Cpan beats the pants off it.

[jsrn]

with "failed attempts to copy" I meant they (Rubygems, Hackage, ...) did not succeed (yet?) to replicate the size, diversity, test coverage, community etc. of CPAN. I do agree that they are useful.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

[wladimir]

Yes, that's clear. But what I don't understand is why the author thinks they have failed? I only have experience with PyPi, combined with easy_install it's an incredibly easy way to install packages and their dependencies.

[unoti]

Failed in the sense that they've failed to recapture the glory of cpan for solving problems from the late 80s and early 90s. Personally I've been very pleased with library support in Python.

Counting a library's worth by the number of things in it is probably not a good measure of its worth. But it'll be who knows how long before pypi or gems overtake cpan in terms of sheer quantity.

A better measure of worth would be a deathmatch showdown between seasoned perl people and seasoned ruby/python/whatever developers, where each can bring the powers of his libraries to bear.

But anyone who has had much exposure to perl people will tell you: never, ever underestimate them. They'll come at you with solutions to problems out of left field that solve the problem in 34 characters of self morphing regular expressions or something while everybody else is turning in comparatively huge 8 line readable programs.

[Mithaldu]

Or they come up with a 5 line solution, using a CPAN module that has had it's battery of unit tests automatically run through on 200+ different os/hardware/perl combinations, which also comes with its own little test suite and works out of the box; while everyone else runs their stuff and discovers they still need to catch a dozen weird edge cases.

Until other languages reach this kind of solidity and thoroughness in testing CPAN will stay at the top of the bunch.