in reply to Starting the development of a module : thoughts
Here are some additional thoughts/steps.
- 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:
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.\bCVS\b ^MANIFEST\. ^Makefile$ ~$ \.old$ ^blib/ ^pm_to_blib$ \.tar\.gz$So, to create a new distribution, I can do:
I keep my MANIFEST.SKIP under source control but that's not really necessary.perl Makefile.PL make manifest make dist - What is 'make build'? My Makefiles don't have a 'build'
target.
- You might also want to get into some of the interesting things
you can do with a Makefile.PL. You can make it sort of a 'configure'
for your distribution.
As an example, the Makefile.PL for Net::SSH::Perl lets the user choose whether to install the prereqs for SSH-1 or SSH-2 (or both), which means that if the user really only wants SSH-1 support, he/she doesn't have to install a bunch of modules he/she doesn't need. Of course, this also means you have to learn to love using require in your code, for runtime loading of modules. :)
Another useful Makefile.PL "trick" is to a "does user have this module installed?" function:
This allows you to do your own prerequisite checking in Makefile.PL, because unfortunately, the prereq checking in the CPAN module depends on having an explicit list of args to PREREQ_PM; it actually parses your Makefile.PL to look for such a list. If you have, for example, this:sub have_mod { my($mod, $ver) = @_; eval("use $mod" . ($ver ? " $ver;" : ";")); !$@; }
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.PREREQ_PM => \%prereq,
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