On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 8:27 PM, Slaven Rezic <sre...@cpan.org> wrote: > David Golden wrote: >> >> On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 7:51 AM, David Golden <xda...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> 21. Formalize optional_features >>> >>> Proposal: >>> >>> Optional features: is supported in META.yml, but it requires a lot of >>> manual intervention and trickery to make it work. And it is very poorly >>> documented. (Tux) >> >> I'm for doing something, either formalizing or removing. I think it's >> a mess as currently exists. >> >> It would be nice to allow "Do you want to add support for blah?" >> questions during install rather than a list of scads of modules to >> install, but that could all be done in *.PL as dynamic configuration. >> I don't see why the bundles really need to be listed in META. > > Because that's the only way to do automatic installation of optional > features possible, in a standardized way. Currently I may say that I want > the feature "fulltext_search" for Tk::Pod via a distropref file. > Theoretically I could also list the required dependencies for fulltext > search in the distropref file, but what if some day Tk::Pod's fulltext > feature is implemented using other modules? > > I vote for formalization.
I don't know the history of this, but - risking that I'll add something already covered - I would propose that if optional features are to be formalized - then they should be allowed to appear in 'require_*'. Otherwise optional features lead to much chaos with packages relying on them but not being able to specify that. Cheers, Zbigniew Lukasiak http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/ http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/
