The installation process needs to know at least:
1. where the accompanying DB-building script should go
2. where the DB that the app builds should go

How can such necessary things be determined, other than by asking
the user?

I was just going to add a note before or after these two queries,
that if they have a mod_perl2 library and want the module to go
there, they should "do this".

As I just wrote to Perrin off-list, since only a tiny fraction of
CPAN downloads are mod_perl2 modules, no one can configure CPAN
for a mod_perl2 library.

Perhaps my attitude toward installation dialogs has been warped
by recent experience with my previous CPAN module IPC::MMA.  The
install for version 0.54 contained no prompts.  Its results came
out 75% unknown, because few test environments included a
necessary C library 'mm'.  One of the chief testers suggested I
should add Devel::CheckLib to Makefile.PL.

So now if Makefile.PL doesn't find 'mm' in /usr/local/lib, it
prompts the user to enter the path to 'mm', which is then passed
to Devel::CheckLib.  The query is accompanied by a note showing
the URL from which 'mm' can be downloaded.

On the other hand, my latest version 0.58 has only been tested by
one tester, a week after uploading it.  Maybe that's because of
the new query in Makefile.PL!

Best Regards,
cmac


On Aug 26, 2009, at 10:44 AM, Michael Peters wrote:

> craig@anim... wrote:
>> Including a note about how to do something in an installation dialog,
>> for people who wouldn't otherwise know, is not controlling anything.
>
> Please don't put a dialog in your installation process! CPAN is  
> supposed to be automatic after it's been configured. There are some  
> rare occasions where it makes sense to ask some questions, but  
> where you want the module installed is not one of them. CPAN takes  
> care of that.
>
> --
> Michael Peters
> Plus Three, LP