Re: META.yaml

[Ken Williams]

On Friday, November 15, 2002, at 09:26  AM, Michael G Schwern wrote:

It hit me while raking leaves today that it would be absolutely *trivial*
for MakeMaker to do the same. All the meta-data already exists in the
MakeMaker object. All that's needed to be done is spit out the file.

As I mentioned privately to Schwern, the only objection I have is that Module::Build still needs to be better at *something*. =)

Seriously though, I still have enough faith in the M::B architecture and so on that I think stuff like this isn't an actual threat to its adoption.

We're following Module::Build's lead here and using its formats and
decisions as much as possible. (Un|)fortuately, its all very flexible and
somewhat undocumented at the moment. So we're going to be making things up
as we go along.

That's true. Currently M::B doesn't *use* the META.yaml file, it only produces it for external tools to use.

When trying to figure out fields for the META.yml file, a nice point of
reference to use is dpkg and the Debian Policy Manual
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
They've solved a lot of the hard packaging problems.

That's what I've been following, or at least inspired by. I've seen it work really nicely in fink, for example.

[3] Module::Build uses META.yaml. We have to use .yml for 8.3 filesystems.
Ken, can Module::Build be changed to match?

Done.

 -Ken