On 02/06/2010 10:29 AM, Allan McRae wrote:
On 06/02/10 09:28, Aaron Griffin wrote:
Message below is trimmed, but the summary is:
pacpan (CPAN wrapper for pacman packages) has been updated with gusto.
There is a request to include using pacpan as part of the official
guidelines for packaging perl apps for Arch. I think this is a good
idea, but it leaves me wondering what we should do with the tool
itself - should we be hosting it in the git repos?
What do you guys think?
I'm not sure about the idea.
From what I understand, Perl comes in CPAN "distributions", which
contain some modules. We take a "distribution" and make a package. This
script fills out a provides array with all modules that are part of the
package and makes the dependencies be these modules. That may be
technically more correct, but the sacrifice is a lot of complexity that
I am not sure is really needed.
How often do modules swap from one "distribution" to another? Robustness
to that is the only advantage I see here. I might be missing something...
Saying that, in total perl modules on my system are what is needed for
SDL_perl (yay frozen bubble!) and that is the limit of the perl
packaging I have to deal with.
Where the rubber hits the road on these issues is packaging software
that requires perl modules. Most that I've encountered require
particular versions (or greater) of particular perl modules.
It's then the job of the perl-module-dependent packager to try to figure
out what version of perl incorporated that module. Then as perl
incorporates more modules into the main distribution, all the
perl-dependent packages must be changed/updated. There are a lot of
packages with perl module dependencies.
As at least one step, it seems a good idea for perl to fully list the
component module provides for what it includes in the distribution. This
is would seemingly benefit packagers of perl-module-dependent packages
greatly, and it doesn't add complexity over what we currently have (a
partial such set of provides).
As for the rest of the proposal, it's less clear to me the right path.
Perhaps others will have experience to share here.
- P
