I recently told a friend that I was starting to learn Catalyst (Perl) and he fairly strongly emphasized that because Catalyst has so freakin’ many dependencies, I should use something like Rails instead.
Isn’t that a good thing that there are a lot of dependencies? Doesn’t that indicate a lot of code re-use? I understand that there might be more effort involved with installing the framework but are there any other disadvantages?
I will resume my Catalyst tutorial until I get some juicy responses. 🙂
When there are version dependencies between components, you can find yourself backed into a non-working situation if you’re forced to upgrade one component (say, for security reasons) before a compatible version of a dependent component is available.
That assumes you can get into a working state in the first place. It may be that if you try to use the current versions of all dependencies, you’ll find that they don’t play along.
The larger the number of dependencies, the greater the risk.
Rails isn’t free of this problem, either. With every new Ruby release, there’s a scramble to update instructions for how to get, say, database drivers built.
To be fair, this problem has trended towards “better” over time, albeit with bumps in the road.