java follies [was: PHP vs Perl (Put on flame proof gear)]

[shadoi]

Barry Roberts wrote:

<snip>
> I am very dependent on some excellent perl web apps (cvsmonitor,
> webgui, rt) that have a lot of dependencies, and I have resigned
> myself to the fact that every time I need to do a clean install on a
> new machine I'm going to spend a half day waiting for errors so I can
> then 'force install', manually editing config files to get things to
> work when everything supposedly went ok with the 'install', and
> basically pulling out hair.  That's why
>
> A central repository of cross-platform C libraries and perl extensions
> that just automagically download, build, and work is a nice dream.
> CPAN is a nightmare.  Downloading .jar files, OTOH really does almost
> always work.
>
>   
Debian.