On May 12, 2006, at 9:03 AM, David Golden wrote:
John M. Gamble wrote:
CPAN, of course, is eternal, but putting the pdf in a module that is
only a tenth its size would be an undue burden on downloaders, not to
mention the lack of a clear policy on this.
How big is the PDF? If it could be optimized down to the 100K
range or less, I wouldn't really think twice about "undue burden".
So. Is there, or could there be, a separate spot on CPAN for
supplemental documentation like PDF files and graphics files? Has
this ever been discussed before?
My immediate thought it to just bundle it in another distribution,
e.g. Math-Polynomial-Solve-Docs. Give that a regular distribution
skeleton with a Pod file that describes what it is and where it is
in the distribution. I think that if you create a "pdf/" directory
and put the file in there, it will get picked up as part of "other
files" by search.cpan.org. Then just reference
"Math::Polynomial::Solve::Docs" in your main Pod file.
If you want to get really fancy, you could also configure a CPAN
install tool to install the PDF in the perl library path for local
browsing. (See the Module::Build::Cookbook for some examples).
Regards,
David Golden
I agree with David in terms of size, but license may be a bigger
problem. Unless the author of the PDF explicitly gave you permission
to release under the same terms as Perl itself (or whatever license
you have chosen for your code) you may need to follow the advice
above and bundle it as a separate upload with a different license.
In that case, you might consider making it a real Bundle so
installing Math-Polynomial-Solve-Docs automatically installs Math-
Polynomial-Solve too.
Chris
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Chris Dolan, Software Developer, Clotho Advanced Media Inc.
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