note
btrott
Here are some additional thoughts/steps.<p>
<ul>
<li> h2xs automatically creates a MANIFEST file. I don't use it;
I delete it. I like using 'make manifest', because it automatically
generates a MANIFEST file for me when I want it. To do this,
set up a MANIFEST.SKIP file. Here's an example of a standard
one I use:
<code>
\bCVS\b
^MANIFEST\.
^Makefile$
~$
\.old$
^blib/
^pm_to_blib$
\.tar\.gz$
</code>
With this in place, I don't have to maintain a list of all my files;
'make manifest' will start at the current directory and assemble
a list of all files not matching the patterns in MANIFEST.SKIP, then
write the names of those files to MANIFEST.<p>
So, to create a new distribution, I can do:
<code>
perl Makefile.PL
make manifest
make dist
</code>
I keep my MANIFEST.SKIP under source control but that's not
really necessary.<p>
<li> What is 'make build'? My Makefiles don't have a 'build'
target.<p>
<li> You might also want to get into some of the interesting things
you can do with a Makefile.PL. You can make it sort of a 'configure'
for your distribution.<p>
As an example, the Makefile.PL for [cpan://Net::SSH::Perl] lets
the user choose whether to install the prereqs for SSH-1 or
SSH-2 (or both), which means that if the user really only wants
SSH-1 support, he/she doesn't have to install a bunch of modules
he/she doesn't need. Of course, this also means you have to
learn to love using [require] in your code, for runtime loading
of modules. :)<p>
Another useful Makefile.PL "trick" is to a "does user have this
module installed?" function:
<code>
sub have_mod {
my($mod, $ver) = @_;
eval("use $mod" . ($ver ? " $ver;" : ";"));
!$@;
}
</code>
This allows you to do your own prerequisite checking in
Makefile.PL, because unfortunately, the prereq checking in
the CPAN module depends on having an explicit list of args
to PREREQ_PM; it actually parses your Makefile.PL to look for
such a list. If you have, for example, this:
<code>
PREREQ_PM => \%prereq,
</code>
then it won't pick up the list of prereqs correctly. So if that list
is dynamic, then you may need to do your own checking.
</ul>
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