> ... I've not usually bothered to look at how the tests or the > Makefile.PL work. This is one reason I haven't tried to distribute my > modules through CPAN.
What no OS X yet!? The drag and drop trick is what you are stuck with in MacPerl, and it's kind of a testament to Perl's flexibility that you can even do this. However you should consider getting your stuff into the CPAN cookie cutter mold if you have the time and energy. Understanding ExtUtils::MakeMaker is not necessary (in fact that way lies madness), but understanding the little that you have to do to get a distribution together is worth the effort. This way you don't have to distribute the code yourself and it is made available at hundreds of mirrors around the world; plus you benefit from the CPAN tools at large: documentation [1], ticketing [2] and testing [3] (among others). Even if you don't send your code to CPAN for the rest of the world to enjoy, you can benefit from having installers for your code. Installers come in handy when you need to migrate your code to a new machine, or when recovering from a failure of some kind [knock on wood]. In general, bundling your code up into installable packages encourages you to think of your software in terms of units of functionality (modules), instead of one big mass of interrelated scripts. Sam Tregar has a book on writing CPAN modules which is a great place to start learning about CPAN if you are interested [4]. //Ed [1] http://search.cpan.org [2] http//rt.cpan.org [3] http://testers.cpan.org/ [4] http://sam.tregar.com/book.html
