OpenSourcery

Until today, elementalClinic (emC) could be installed in one of two ways:

1. from a Debian package, generated by a script hidden somewhere in svn
2. by hand, after reading the INSTALL instructions, with cp

This is as inconvenient as it sounds.

Now, though, emC uses a boring, standard Perl distribution installer written with Module::Build. This is a huge win for several reasons:

• less custom installer code to maintain, and what's left is Perl instead of make/shell
• improved handling of Perl module dependencies -- I had hand-rolled something to work with the old Makefile, but the standard Perl tools are better
• a wider selection of tools in general -- anything anyone's ever written to analyze, transform, or package a Perl distribution now works with emC

It was a real joy to go through the install instructions and delete huge swaths of text instructing people to find those dependencies by hand, not to mention the fact that the dependency lists were often somewhat stale (as such documentation tends to be).