Steven's manifypods patch gave me the motivation to finally do something I've been meaning to do since I took over MakeMaker. Namely to seperate out the generation of each make target into individual methods. This allows fine-grained overriding of MakeMaker's functionality both for external users and for internal users.
I've started with the dist_core() method. MM_VMS was overriding it just to do slight alterations to three targets. It has been seperated into dist_target, tardist_target, uutardist_target, tarfile_target, zipdist_target, zipfile_target and shdist_target methods. One method for each target. dist_core() now just calls each of those methods and concatinates the results together. As a result instead of MM_VMS overriding all of dist_core it can just override zipfile_target, tarfile_target and shdist_target removing a chunk of redundancy. This also means the *_target methods can be moved out of MM_Unix and into MM_Any. Even though they're not totally cross-platform, they're pretty close. I haven't decided how to organize the *_target methods. Should they be grouped together or kept together with related code? (ie. would dist_target go near dist_core?) I'm thinking the former and let the methods which just pull together bunches of targets fade away into compatibility obscurity. Another approach is to move all the _target methods off into their own class and have a hierarchy of platform dependent target classes (ie. EU::Target::Unix, EU::Target::VMS, etc..) and then inherit from both an EU::Target::* and an EU::MM_* class. I've considered having MM delegate to an EU::Target object rather than inherit, but there's just too much information inside the MM object needed to generate targets and I don't want to complicate things by having to pass it all around. Not yet anyway. Meanwhile, if anyone has the urge, you can start pulling apart some methods that generate multiple targets. If you're going to do something that might take a while, like install(), post to the list so we don't trip on each other. -- Michael G. Schwern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/ Perl Quality Assurance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kwalitee Is Job One gigaconway: a hypothetical unit of mind expansion, so disturbing it is likely to change the fundemental nature of the universe. Some contend that gigaconway events, while rare, are much cheaper to produce than antiprotons, nuclear weapons or even XML specifications, and start at US$60,000 each. If you believe gigaconway events are indeed possible, please send your tax deductable contributions to: The Conway Fund, c/o Yet Another Society http://www.yetanother.org/ -- Ziggy
