I’ve recently been pushing for greater support for Catalyst and MojoMojo on Debian. For the uninitiated, Catalyst is a Model-View-Controller Framework designed for writing web applications. MojoMojo is a Wiki application based on Catalyst that provides a lot of neat features; while it seems less popular than Wikimedia’s MediaWiki software, it’s still got plenty of features other wikis don’t.
Here’s a blurb about it from their homepage:
We also have a bunch of features you won’t find in every wiki, like an attachment system that automatically makes a web gallery of your photos, live AJAX previews as you are editing your text, and a proper full text search engine built straight into the software.
Unfortunately, such a rich feature set comes at a price — this shiny piece of software has a rather large dependency chain. As a result, building the module (after building its prerequisites) from CPAN is both slow and prone to failure, since each module must be individually retrieved, extracted, built, tested and then installed.
To make matters worse, any failure anywhere in the chain (perhaps a new version of a module breaks things) will cause a complete failure to build the module — either Catalyst or MojoMojo — which has some serious implications for production applications.
In Debian, we mitigate this risk by having separate unstable and testing distributions, so if a newer version breaks things in unstable, we will catch it and have a chance to fix it before the package makes it into testing. By packaging these modules for Debian, we get the advantages of a faster installation process (since we’re installing pre-built binaries) combined with better Quality Assurance.
One of the big issues blocking both of these has been missing copyright information for a lot of modules. I’ve worked a lot with Matt S. Trout, one of the primary people behind coordinating the efforts of the Catalyst project, and gathered the necessary information for an upgrade and upload into Debian.
Recently, libcatalyst-modules-perl (version 35) and libcatalyst-modules-extra-perl (version 4) were uploaded to Debian, containing many necessary updates and fixes to improve the Catalyst experience on Debian. The next big push is to get MojoMojo’s dependencies packaged (currently only String::Diff is blocking it, due to missing copyright information).
A bounty of $150 is being offered by one of the MojoMojo developers to the first person who can re-implement the String::Diff functionality in a free/open source way.
[…] } Earlier in the year, I wrote a similar article discussing the Catalyst Web Framework and the MojoMojo Wiki software. At the beginning of December […]
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