Comment by _xo_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _xo_ | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

They really should have added CPAN (for perl) to their list. Perl might not be the most popular language nowadays, but in my opinion, their package manager gets a lot of things right...

* centrally hosted

* mirrored all over the world

* packages are automatically checksummed & the checksum is compared on install

* is is quite easy to publish packages

and very important in my opinion

* it encourages you to write tests. Unit tests included in packages are automatically executed when it is installed. Many systems (semi)-automatically report back when the installation of a package fails. Hence you get tests on tons of platforms for your package

* pod documentation is automatically available on cpan.

More importantly, without CPAN, we might not have things like pip and npm.

Please check CPAN Testers and copy that too to the Python world.

Not only will you get comprehensive tests and reports of all the packages with different OS/language versions, it is a great test of the language implementation with different C compilers etc.

We are constantly adding new package managers to our system. CPAN and Nuget are already on our radar. We will update the blog post in a couple months with them.

I'm picking up Python in my new job, and one thing that I dearly miss from Perl is an equivalent to Dist::Zilla (https://metacpan.org/release/Dist-Zilla). After a bit of initial setup (name, PAUSE account, etc), publishing is about as easy as

   dzil new My::Module
   <build library>
   dzil test #Make sure the build and tests go okay
   <set version and add changes to changefile>
   dzil publish

AFAICR, CPAN is PM's PM, and it's been that way for as long as I can remember. When is the next Perl resurrection ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com