[Module-build-general] Re: Module::Build

[Ken W. <ke...@ma...>]

On Wednesday, August 28, 2002, at 10:06 PM, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote:
> I went to Hugo's london.pm talk last night, and he talked about 
> Module::Build as one of the big changes for 5.10.

Cool, I didn't know he was speaking about it.

> I've just been looking at the search.cpan.org render of 
> Build.pm's perldoc. What you don't seem to provide that would 
> certainly be useful to all sorts of people is a way of hooking 
> this to legacy packaging systems. I know that it would be 
> fantastic if I could have perl modules on my FreeBSD system 
> install as if they were just ports, or on my Debian system as 
> if they were just Debian packages.

The step I've taken in that direction is to make modules' 
meta-information become more static and more accessible.  
There's a new META.yaml file that contains the distribution 
name, version, dependencies, license, and a few other things, 
including whether this information can be considered 
"authoritative" or not (or whether the Build.PL script needs to 
be run before you get the "real" answers).

I'm hoping that this kind of information will be enough for 
someone to write a packaging layer on top.  The packaging layer 
might become part of Module::Build, but I'm guessing it might 
fit better in CPAN.pm or its replacement.

> I'm not suggesting that you write the actual code to do this, 
> but depending
> on what stage of development this module is in, if you can 
> provide hooks that allow for an OS-installed module to be able 
> to manage versions in this way, I think this would be very very 
> useful.

I definitely agree.

By the way, there's a low-volume Module::Build mailing list, 
which I'm Cc-ing on this message.

  -Ken