I just did a presentation at the Toronto Perlmongers monthly meeting about my new module CSVDB, which lets a user access a CSV using SQL commands. This is a version 0.01 module, so needs lots of work to get ready to be usable, but I've been putting off uploading stuff to CPAN for about twenty years and decided I'd better do it before another twenty years go by.

I used Andy Lester's module-starter to get started about two weeks ago, but that module doesn't have anything about packaging up my code, so I went looking and eventually found a link to Minilla. I installed that, fixed a few things, but eventually wound up confused, because minil release was asking me about the next version (??) so I suggested 0.02 .. and got this error

...
xt/minilla/cpan_meta.t ........ ok   
xt/minilla/minimum_version.t .. 1/13 
#   Failed test 'Build.PL'
#   at /usr/local/share/perl/5.30.0/Test/MinimumVersion/Fast.pm line 1
+01.
# Build.PL requires 5.008_001 due to explicit requirement
# Looks like you failed 1 test of 13.
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Looking in Build.PL, I see that this is an autogenerated file, and shouldn't be touched. So that appears to be a dead end.

OK .. what else can I find? Ah, mbtiny looks like it will do the job, so I installed App::ModuleBuildTiny and run the command to build a distribution.

tab@music4: (main) $ mbtiny dist
Changes appears to be empty
tab@music4: (main) $ wc -l Changes 
5 Changes
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It appears to be complaining about an empty file that is .. not empty.

I don't understand why minil wants to know about the *next* version .. I just want to package up the *existing* version. I don't understand why mbtiny thinks a non-empty file is empty, and why that means it won't build a release.

I still have work to do -- my MANIFEST file needs updating, so I'm going to do that, then I'll probably just download one of the tarballs from CPAN and take it apart to see what's going on. I'll make this happen.

Suggestions about what the heck's going on will be gratefully received.