# from Jesse Vincent
# on Thursday 15 April 2010 09:24:
>-1 ... Forcing an extension makes all sorts of tools that
>previously "just worked" with a tarball suddenly start to fail.
Which tools are going to "just work" on a perl 6 tarball? If it's a
generic tar tool, it should still just work regardless of the
extension. If it's assuming a perl5 dist, it is going to fail in
amazing ways. Then we'll have perl6 authors getting spurious mail from
bots about how their code doesn't run in perl5?
># from Tim Bunce
>>-1 ... It's also the wrong place to encode version information.
But perl6 is not a version of perl5.
>Larry points out that the shibboleth for Perl 6 code is:
>: No package statements. Instead, you'll see "module" statements.
That requires examining the contents and not just the path, and doesn't
solve the naming conflict on the CPAN filesystem.
>And I really like having Perl 6 dists split out into /perl6/ inside an
>author directory.
I really dislike this. Again, tools that assume perl5 dists are going
to suddenly be assaulted by perl6 dists and it is going to leave us
with a kludgy mess. Anything that uses `find -name '*.tar.gz'` will
need special rules to skip perl6 directories.
>It keeps the author tree together as one coherent
>community while making it really easy for people browsing the
> hierarchy to understand what's what.
I'm all for that, but if we're not going to have a replica of the
existing tree rooted at /perl6/, then the next best thing would be to
have a new file extension.
It's easy enough to add a file extension to existing code which can
handle perl6 dists, requires no immediate plumbing on PAUSE, and it
solves the filename conflict between an author's perl5/perl6 dists e.g.
E/EW/EWILHELM/Foo-Bar-v1.2.0.tar.gz | E/EW/EWILHELM/Foo-Bar-v1.2.0.p6d.
If we're going to decide that a naming convention is the quick-fix place
to start, let's use one that isn't going to cause trouble for existing
tools. The file extension convention has the benefit of also giving
meaning to the filename outside of the CPAN tree, which opens the
possibility of having smarter tools later.
--Eric
--
"If you only know how to use a hammer, every problem begins to look like
a nail."
--Richard B. Johnson
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