[Koha-devel] CPAN and re-inventing the wheel

[Alan Millar]

Hi-  I noticed Steve found and fixed a bug in checkvalidisbn().  That's
great, but it got me thinking about re-inventing the wheel.  

There are a number of CPAN modules that Koha could be making use of,
such as in this case Business::ISBN, which seemingly would bypass
the whole issue of us needing to find and fix such bugs.

I've seen comments in the past, somewhere in the list archives I 
believe, that some Koha folks would rather write new routines in
order to have fewer installation dependencies.

I don't think installation dependencies are the real problem.  I
think installation simplicity is the real problem.  If there was
an easier way to ensure dependencies are met, wouldn't that be
better than writing more code and introducing more bugs?

Perhaps we could have a step in the install process that checks
for required modules, and runs (or at least creates) some sort of CPAN 
download script to install any missing modules.

What do you think?

- Alan

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Alan Millar     --==> am12 at bolis.com <==--