On Oct 5, 2006, at 5:50 AM, Ron Savage wrote:
Of course I don't expect Data::Package to tell me that a dependency requires compilation, although dare I say that should be the goal of this first step.
Yeah, I agree. Probably this will be best handled by the higher- level tools like CPAN and/or PAUSE and/or PAR and/or PPM. Module::Build can help each distro specify what its dependencies are and whether it requires a compiler, and the higher-level tools can string that information together and report what's necessary to the user.
So, there are a couple of different ways we could frame this. We could add a narrow-ish flag like 'needs_compiler'. Or we could try to automatically put it right in the prereq section as 'build_requires' information. This could either be by adding 'ExtUtils::CBuilder' as a 'build_requires' item, or by specifying somehow that M::B needs to have the 'C_support' feature enabled.
-Ken
