Listing scripts in distribution metadata

perlancar has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I wonder why the CPAN distribution metadata does not define a more general 'provides' to let a distribution specifies the list of scripts or other documents that it contains, in addition to packages. It would make things easier for tools like MetaCPAN, or App::lcpan. Right now I believe (not confirmed yet by reading the source code) that MetaCPAN performs some static parsing of Makefile.PL to get EXE_FILES, but less-than-straightforward declaration of EXE_FILES will make it miss (example: Spreadsheet-Read's Makefile.PL).

Comment on Listing scripts in distribution metadata

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Re: Listing scripts in distribution metadata by tobyink (Canon) on Oct 27, 2020 at 23:56 UTC
I've been using an `x_provides_scripts` hash in META.json, modelled after the standard `provides` hash. So say your distribution provides a "csv2json" script, your META.json would contain: `"x_provides_scripts": { "csv2json": { "version": "0.1", "file": "bin/csv2json" } }` [download] toby döt ink	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Listing scripts in distribution metadata by perlancar (Hermit) on Oct 28, 2020 at 22:58 UTC
Perfect. I'll be adding a support for x_provides_scripts in App::lcpan. I've also started to document the list of custom keys like this in CPAN::Meta::X.	[reply]