Re: [sprog-users] Parse HTML Table Error - Debian

[Grant M. <gr...@mc...>]

Hi William

Welcome to the list.

On Wed, 2005-07-06 at 11:43 -0400, William O'Higgins wrote: 
> I've been meaning to poke around on sprog since I read the article on
> O'Reilly, and the first thing I tried threw an error.

To put it slightly differently, you had no problem installing Sprog or
getting it to run and display the main application Window.  But when you
tried to add a specific gear to the workspace you got an error message. 

> I wanted to parse an HTML table, and I got an error that, at the root of
> the problem, was based on not having XML::LibXML installed.

Good diagnosis.  

> I am on Debian, and I did some poking, and installed these additional
> components: xml2 libxml-libxml-perl libxml2-dev

Actually, the libxml-libxml-perl was the only one that Sprog needed.

> Now that cog no longer throws the error.  I think though, that the
> dependencies for the libsprog-perl should include libxml-libxml-perl,
> and maybe xml2.  What does anyone else think?

I (perhaps optimistically) envisage that there will eventually be Sprog
components for half the modules on CPAN.  But, having to install half of
CPAN just to get Sprog running would present quite a barrier to entry.

So instead, my plan is to allow gear classes to declare dependencies.
Then in the circumstance you described, Sprog would recognise which CPAN
module was missing and would determine the corresponding package for
your OS distribution through some mapping process.  Instead of the
current Perl compilation error, Sprog would pop up an alert dialog
advising you that you needed to install the libxml-libxml-perl package.

> I'm no Debian guru but I have learnt a bit about how to get myself out
> of (and into, can't forget to mention into) trouble, and this was my first
> experiment with sprog.

And you passed the test with flying colours :-)

Future versions of Sprog will be more supportive of adventurers such as
yourself.  We're still in the early stages of development.

Thanks for your feedback.

Grant