gugod
Idea: provide pre-built perls for popular OSes
I just compiled a perl for my new temporary VM, and my desktop is pretty fast, but it still took a couple of annoying minutes.
Do you think it would be a good idea to be able to install pre-built perls, so that users could avoid wasting CPU cycles and delay the global warming? :)
For example, perlbrew install --prefer-prebuilt 5.16.1 could look at user's OS (Ubuntu and OSX are pretty easy to detect, and I suspect they make up more than a half of systems people use), look for url like http://perlbrew.nl/dists/osx/10.8/5.16.1.tar.gz, fetch it and untar it.
Moreover, perlbrew share 5.16.1 command could upload newly built perl somewhere for other people to use.
I know there are issues such as traffic costs, security considerations for the share part, and custom compilation flags, but I think it'd be a nice feature to have.
I do consider distributing prebuilt perl binary installation is a good idea, since, well, why not :)
That being said, I do not have a solid idea how to make this works well cross-platofrm-ish. Detecting proper architecture would be one problem, whether to provide different configure options (threaded / 64bit etc) is another.
Also there are existing binary distributions like ActivePerl, dwimperl, maybe we could look into how to seamlessly support those (if possible).
Interesting idea. I was searching just for that because I'm compiling several different perls for OpenBSD 6.2, and basically I'm only changing versions... being able to pack (tarball?) once compiled and stored them somewhere else would speed up things nicely, specially if I also installed several modules that I need. If I may suggest, we could start slow: just offer an option on perlbrew to "pack" an already installed and include a file with metadata including OS name, version, processor architecture and compiler versions... later, perlbrew could search and unpack those guys, installing only if there is a match.
