Re: [Module::Build] Ready for 0.22?

[Randy W. S. <Ra...@Th...>]

On 1/10/2004 12:18 AM, Glenn Linderman wrote:

> On approximately 1/9/2004 3:27 PM, came the following characters from
> the keyboard of Ken Williams:
> 
>>  - The 'dist' action now accepts an optional 'tar' parameter to use a
>>    system utility for building the tarball, and a 'gzip' parameter for
>>    compressing it.  If these are used, Archive::Tar won't be invoked.
>>
>> The idea is that people who still can't get Archive::Tar to work might 
>> have some other alternative, like a Cygwin tar/gzip or whatever.
> 
> 
> Yep, that sounds useful as a workaround to dysfunctional Archive::Tar 
> releases.  If PPM can deal with such, and I suspect it can, as I guess 
> that is why modules built with MakeMaker don't have that problem... they 
> pretty much require having a TAR and GZIP program on the box.  And PPM 
> can deal with MakeMaker built modules.
> 
> I really don't understand how, if PPM uses A::T to dearchive modules, 
> why M::B using A::T to archive the modules in the first place wouldn't 
> work, but that seems to be the way it is at the moment.  But I don't 
> know how PPM really dearchives modules, or maybe A::T is more robust at 
> dearchiving than it is at archiving.

I don't know why this is just now occuring to me (prolly 'cuz I don't 
use ppm), but ppm can use both .tar.gz archives and .zip archives. If 
you look at the repository at 
<http://ppm.activestate.com/PPMPackages/zips/8xx-builds-only/Windows/> 
you'll see that all of them are .zip archives, so that's the reason this 
issue has never come up before wrt ppm. There are a couple of other 
repositories out there (Jenda Krynicky's and Randy Kobes' though I don't 
remember the urls); I suspect that they either use zips or use a working 
version of tar to create their archives.

MakeMaker has a zipdist target in addition to the regular dist target. I 
  personally don't see the value in providing support for another 
format. FWIW, I believe M::B shouldn't try to do more than it absolutely 
has to so that it stays simple and easy to maintain and port. If/When a 
plugin architecture is adopted for M::B, someone could easily add a 
zipdist target as an addon as well as other ActiveState specific stuff 
like their custom html man pages, etc. Or it may be possible to use the 
new 'tar' and 'gzip' arguments to fool M::B into creating a zip, but I 
haven't tried it yet.

Regards,
Randy.