Please Stop Including the Kitchen Sink

I needed to install Business::OnlinePayment::WorldPay @ $work today. I had been using the module in my own perlbrew name space so as to not pollute the server with unnecessary modules, but as the code went live I needed to install it server side.

Little did I know that it triggers once of those dependency cascades that includes the kitchen sink.

Dancer v2 is coming

Perl Dancer one of the crop of new Perl web-app frameworks, and one that is related in style to Ruby’s successful Sinatra framework, is announcing the development of Dancer 2.

What does that module do? aliased.pm

In my first post in this series I explained how Task::Kensho provided a nice list of modules to install to give a good basis for many common actions.

When installing some of those modules I had one of those “I wonder what that does” moments when cpanm showed that it was installing “aliased.pm”. Generally all lower case module names are reserved for pragmas and modules that provide pragma like support, so I was curious to know what this module did.

What does that module do? Task::Kensho.pm

Whenever I look at CPAN I am always amazed at the number of Perl modules that are available. Over 101,000 as of today. It just blows me away that that much time and effort has been put into coding these modules, by all of those people, and for free.

But at the same time I can’t help but think how can anyone possibly find the time to know what they all do? How do you find out what modules are relevant or helpful for your daily programming? More over when you are installing a module and it pulls in other modules don’t you want to know why? Perhaps some of those other modules could be useful to you too.