Those of you who were at Birmingham heard me go on and on about my burning desire to replace the use of YAML in CPAN dist metadata with JSON. I'd be happy to review the reasons, but for now I'll take it for granted that we all know them and agree. That certainly seemed to be the case amongst the crowd at QA09.
Today I updated my proof of concept (and/or civil disobedience dist) JSON-Meta-CPAN, which makes all the three common build tools (Module::Build, Module::Install, and ExtUtils::MakeMaker) optionally produce JSON instead of YAML. With the new version, dists will not produce a META.yml, but will *instead* produce a META.json. I have also updated my own build system, Dist::Zilla, to do the same when asked. Next steps include: * update PAUSE to prefer META.json to META.yml if available * update CPAN.pm to look at (MY)?META.json * update CPANPLUS.pm to do the same * update the build tools to generate (MY)?META.json by default * update the META spec to demand JSON * declare META.yml a legacy file I think I can manage the first myself; I was just looking at it, and extract_readme_and_yaml in mldistwatch looks like the important thing. I am happy to try to slog through more of the other tasks, but I don't know at what speed I'll go. Unless there are strenuous objections, however, I plan to assume that we still more or less agree on this plan, and I'm going to start leading the way by shipping META.json files. I look forward to the people's glorious future. -- rjbs
