The Perl community seems abuzz about the cool new cpanminus client by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa. After about two weeks of development, this is a reasonably functional CPAN client with just a fraction of the overhead, complexity and verbosity of the CPAN and CPANPLUS clients that come with the Perl core.

It’s a remarkable achievement, not only technically, but in the reaction it has sparked. As one of the (sometimes reluctant) maintainers of CPAN and CPANPLUS, I’ve realized that I both love and hate cpanminus.

I love that Miyagawa has done so much with so little and in such a short span of time

I hate that fanboy-types flocked to it and trashed the older clients without noting cpanminus’ limitations

I love that Perl toolchain maintainers have rallied around Miyagawa and contributed their wisdom to make cpanminus better instead of rejecting it

I hate that one of Perl’s great strengths (CPAN) has legacy clients that are so unwieldy, hated and difficult to maintain

Miyagawa graciously acknowledges standing on the shoulders of giants. Still, I can’t shake the nagging thought that cpanminus should never have been necessary in the first place.

What I’ve come to realize is that cpanminus is another example of the power of not being all things to all people. Miyagawa doesn’t promise that it works for all of CPAN or that it works everywhere that Perl does. He doesn’t have to. Making it work for 99% of CPAN for 99% of people is more than good enough.

I’ve been co-maintaining various parts of the Perl toolchain for a while now. It’s a frustrating challenge needing to make thing work everywhere, for everything, and trying as hard as possible not to break backwards compatibility. Plus, I don’t even get to use CPAN to make life easier. I don’t get to use handy tools like Moose or DateTime or Regexp::Common or SQLite or anything in the Config::* namespace or even basic tools like Archive::Zip. Nearly everything is done by hand.

Things have to work with just core Perl on a diverse set of platforms and with an incredibly limited set of assumptions. For example, the Perl core still doesn’t come with an HTTP client, so CPAN has to rely on FTP or command line programs to bootstrap LWP. (This is something I personally plan to tackle during the Perl 5.13 development series later this year.)

I think this is an ongoing challenge for core Perl development in general. It’s a lot of work to be all things to all people and I keep wondering whether making things simpler and better for 99% of people would be a better choice. (Anyone else for use strict by default? I hope that finally comes to pass in Perl 5.14.) chromatic writes about this topic often in his Modern Perl blog and I usually tend to agree with the points he makes. ( October February 2009 had a particularly good series of posts.)

In the meantime, I look at cpanminus with greed and envy. Miyagawa++