Sawyer X

So I'm back to posting, and apparently I'm not the only one.

As much as I'm impressed by the work done by Reini Urban on LLVM and the compiler, I disagree with his last post.

When I started writing CPAN distributions, EU::MM looked to me like something I will never write. Take this Makefile.PL for example, taken from Test::Simple. Compared to many other Makefile.PL files, this is actually clean and straightforward. It still looks like something I would never write. Why would I ever want to?

Don't get me wrong, EU::MM seems like something you might enjoy, but not necessarily, and definitely not for everyone. Module::Build provides a good foundation for common requirements of the average programmer. It's very extensible, has a clean and - more importantly - clear API and easy to read and write. I also personally really like the whole "if we're gonna run Perl anyway, let's just do the toolchain in Perl" idea. I was also able to happily contribute to M::B (David Golden++) and overall have a good working experience for it.

Hopefully without antagonizing too much, I would compare it to Ubuntu vs. Slackware (well, maybe you'd have to squint a bit). Ubuntu might not have all the flexibility of Slackware (though it might! I don't know very well, nor do I care), but Ubuntu allows a common user with the common use-case to work happily. You might want more control, you might want more bare-bones. That's just fine (and perhaps that's why you'll need Slackware), but it does not mean Ubuntu isn't good, worthwhile, a great project or something you should suggest users.

(and I hope I'm not gonna get a war started in the comments...)