Re: Check a script's module dependencies

Good idea, nice effort, and probably the same route I'd take if I hadn't picked up various details during my Perl efforts. However, there are better ways to do this. Regexing sources is easy to break and your script cannot conveniently report recursive dependencies where a module a script depends on relies on other modules itself.

I was going to post a snippet here, but thought it could be useful to more people, so I decided to post it in a more prominent spot. Check robustly list any Perl code's module dependencies for the result. Cheers :-)

Makeshifts last the longest.

Comment on Re: Check a script's module dependencies

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Re: Re: Check a script's module dependencies by hans_moleman (Beadle) on Oct 06, 2002 at 12:19 UTC
Nicely done! Yes, using internal Perl tools seems like a more robust approach than parsing source code. Frankly, I've got some reading to do to understand how your code does what it does...	[reply]
Re^3: Check a script's module dependencies by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Oct 06, 2002 at 12:45 UTC
It's not very complicated once you know how loading modules works: basically, the `@INC` array contains all the paths to any directories where `perl` should look for modules. Usually, these are only strings, but you can also put a reference to a subroutine in there; when `perl` is searching for modules, it will call that routine if it hasn't found the module by one of the paths that appear before it in the array. Along with various parameters passed to such a routine is the module's path in the second parameter which is in this case copied to `$_` in order to massage it to my liking. Because this is a module, the code in its main body gets executed as soon as the module is loaded, at compile time, and therefor gets to modify the `@INC` array before anything else has happened. Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]


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