[Bioperl-l] Cleanup of BioPerl distribution website

[Nathan S. Haigh]

Chris Fields wrote:
> Mauricio,
>
> I personally don't have a problem with the changes.  Bioperl 1.5 had 
> serious problems anyway.  It's a shame we don't have a 1.5.1 ppm but 
> when we release 1.5.2 we'll add one to DIST.  Nathan, what do you think?
>
> When I make up a local ppm package for installation on WinXP, I 
> maunally edit the XML generated (the ppd file) to make it more 
> consistent with my local distribution, including modifying the 
> prereqs.  I think we can also include an installation script with the 
> ppm (which I haven't played around with, but Scott Cain has done this 
> with the Generic Genome Browser PPM package).  When we start making 
> release candidates I can try packaging everything up for Windows and 
> have you add it to the main directory, then modify the package.lst to 
> point to the newer ppms as well as Text::ShellWords and GD::SVG.  We 
> can have the old package.lst (in old_releases) point at the older 
> distributions.
>
> Chris
>
I don't have any immediate problems about the changes either. I've seen 
a few posts recently about installing Bioperl on Windows - how soon will 
1.5.2 been released? It's not too difficult to generate a new ppd file 
etc so I could make a barebones ppd for 1.5.1?

I know when I made the ppd file for 1.5 I included a lot of prereqs to 
ensure that most of bioperl would work without the need to manually 
install the modules later once the user found out that something didn't 
work. Personally, despite the need to download and install a lot more 
packages in one sitting, I thought this was important since Windows 
users that install bioperl are probably (or more likely) not from a 
programming background (no offence intended if your a whiz programmer 
working in Windows! :o) ). Therefore, their first experience of bioperl 
would get off to a better start if everything worked out of the hat 
after its installation, despite having a longer/bigger install. What do 
you think?

What is the state of play with regards to tracking dependencies? I've 
just noticed that Makefile.PL has a lot more packages in %packages, is 
this a complete list of prereqs? If so, could they be added to PREREQ_PM 
in the WriteMakefile sub in order to make it easier for generating a ppd 
with a complete prereqs list?

Nath