I would like to factor out the explicit detection and configuration of the PDL build process on external libraries (such as PROJ4, HDF5, FFTW3,...) into corresponding Alien::PROJ4 or similar distributions. The job of these Alien::XXX modules is to check for XXX. or install XXX, and provide configuration to the perl module that does a 'use Alien::XXX'. The Alien::XXX module would then provide the needed information on how to build against the XXX dependency for the perl module (usually an XS based module).
It seems to me that the logical thing would be to have linux package dependencies for PDL on Alien::XXX and then the package for Alien::XXX would have a dependency on the underlying XXX library/dependency. This would be for a binary install. Is this a reasonable approach from the considerations of linux packaging? --Chris
