Kenichi Ishigaki

I gave a talk at OSDC.TW 2011 about PPM as yet another faster installer, and several modules I took over from Randy Kobes who passed away last year.

Compared to the transition from CPAN/CPANPLUS to App::cpanminus, PPM, which once used a remote API server but now downloads indices (summary) and store them in a local database, seems to be taking a different (or opposite) track. Its XML based spec is apparently old-fashioned (actually, the original Open Source Description spec, on which PPM spec was based, was deprecated years ago). And the one on the CPAN is way behind the one bundled in ActivePerl. Certainly it's not good for everyone.

However, ActiveState (and some other repositories) provides packages not only for perls for Windows, but also (threaded) perls for Linux and Mac OS X (and you can provide your own packages easily). If conditions are met, and you are a person who wishes to install modules with least hassles, or install the same modules into several or dozens of machines, PPM might be one of your options.

That said, there're several things we can/should improve now. I started writing a new PPM client (and an API server, which is not uploaded to anywhere but my dev server yet; I will create a public repository later, maybe after I refactor it a bit) so that you could use the latest PPM repositories even when you use other perls than ActivePerl. I also took over the maintenance of PPM::Make (to make a PPM repository), CPAN::Search::Lite (yet another CPAN search site with PPM support), and PAR::WebStart (to let CPAN::Search::Lite users to launch CPAN/PPM client from a page you visit via your web browser). If you have any issues, please let me know via RT or via email or via Github or whatever.

Thank you all in Taiwan. I really enjoyed OSDC this year. See you next year, or maybe in October in Japan :)