At work I manage a build consisting of Java and Perl projects. The current
build is a mixture of GNU make and Ant. I've been experimenting with Gradle
(0.8). Naturally Gradle is well suited to managing the Java parts of the build.
Less so for managing the Perl parts. Specifically Perl external module
dependencies (e.g. CPAN modules) are a challenge.
Perl CPAN modules are distributed as source. The CPAN system includes
dependency metadata. Perl includes the `cpan` command which works similar to
apt or yum, except that instead of downloading binary distributions, cpan
manages the downloading of source dependencies, building and installing them
into your Perl tree.
For reasons important to us we don't rely on the `cpan` tool. Instead we
recreate its functionality in our Makefile. Evaluating Gradle as a way to
consolidate on one build system, I'm find that the only way to support source
dependencies is a large amount of scripting.
Are there plans to (or interest in) support external dependencies that are only
available in source code form?
Cheers,
Tim
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