What's wrong with using a framework that has a lot of dependencies? [closed]

Question

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. :-)

Answer 1

There is nothing particularly wrong with this. The advantage of Catalyst is that its pieces can be used by people not using all of Catalyst. This means that there are more eyes looking at, and fixing bugs in, the critical parts.

The biggest complain I hear of is that it's annoying to watch all those messages go by in the CPAN shell as Catalyst is installing. The solution is to take advantage of your OS's package manager as you are getting started. On Debian, apt-get install libcatalyst-perl takes 15 seconds to install on a machine with no other Perl modules installed. 15 seconds. (A plain CPAN install is not difficult either, but I guess the standard CPAN shell asks you a lot of dumb questions, and that puts off the newbies.)

Don't worry about the dependencies, there are good tools for managing them, and they make the framework stronger and more flexible.