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

OK, finally created a CPAN module. I am now the most clueless Perl Developer.

Getting something up and working on CPAN was fairly painless. I might not have known exactly what I was doing with commands like h2xs and make distcheck but blindly following the advice of some helpful documentation worked. I'm still left scratching my head over where the process pulled in my email address from (it's the wrong one) and the best way to get my GitHub repo linked on the left hand side of the metacpan page. I'll figure this out in due time.

My question is, are there tools out there to this whole process as seamless and painless as possible? After making a couple of revisions to my module, I notice there are many repetitive tasks. There are a couple of dozen commands involved with making even a simple change to a POD file in the module. I'm imagining there must be script or suite of tools that:

1) Had a simple config file where you put in all your PAUSE account and GitHub credentials and knew which repo on github your project was associated with

2) Config file would also contain any info that goes into Makefile.PL and offer suggestions if you are missing data in your config or it can't figure it out from POD or module code

3) Would automatically generate required CPAN files and upload them to CPAN for you

4) Would push the changes automatically out to your github repo

5) Take care of versioning information for you

6) Generate necessary README files.

So, for example, let's say I want to do something as fix an embarrassing typo to the POD that I wanted to push out immediately. First, I'd make the change. Then I'd be sure to change the version number in the code. Then I'd be sure to change the version number in the READMD.md file for GitHub and the plain README file for CPAN. Then I'd change the name of directory the code is in for cpan. Then I'd issue (after looking them up first) my commands to generate the updated CPAN version. Then I upload my tarball to PAUSE (after transferring it to another machine that has a browser on it). Then I issue my git commands to commit the new code to GitHub. Then I check cpan and github to make sure I didn't screw something up.

Instead of all that, ideally, I'd like just do something like this from the command line: update_module -v .22

and be done.

There seems like there are a patchwork of tools out there to do parts of these tasks but I'm not sure if there is anything that does it all. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks.

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot Bishop Pontiff Deacon Curate Priest";
$nysus = $PM . ' ' . $MCF;
Click here if you love Perl Monks

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Making the CPAN/GitHub updating process painless
by Corion (Patriarch) on Dec 16, 2017 at 16:11 UTC
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Re: Making the CPAN/GitHub updating process painless
by 1nickt (Canon) on Dec 16, 2017 at 16:13 UTC

    See Dist::Zilla. The docs are minimal. Look at the dist.ini of other distros for examples. Get help at #distzilla on irc.perl.org.


    The way forward always starts with a minimal test.
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      Ah, OK, I first saw this package referenced by Dancer2 project. Was wondering WTF it was. I'll go this route. Thanks. There is an interactive tutorial here: tutorial.

      $PM = "Perl Monk's";
      $MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot Bishop Pontiff Deacon Curate Priest";
      $nysus = $PM . ' ' . $MCF;
      Click here if you love Perl Monks

[reply]

        Dist::Zilla is an 800lb gorilla primarily designed for busy CPAN authors of multiple packages. Like Corion, I don't use it. I set it up back in the day but it has, in my estimation, a lopsided cost to benefit ratio for the casual or infrequent author. You'll have to decide if it suits your use case and preferred workflow.

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      OK, got it working. Is it a good idea to release the Manifest, yaml and other such files for cpan to github? I see it done all the time but seems to just get in the way.

      $PM = "Perl Monk's";
      $MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot Bishop Pontiff Deacon Curate Priest";
      $nysus = $PM . ' ' . $MCF;
      Click here if you love Perl Monks

[reply]
        The rule is simple: what can't be generated belongs to version control. What can be generated doesn't belong there.

        ($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord
}map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,

        [download]
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Re: Making the CPAN/GitHub updating process painless
by choroba (Cardinal) on Dec 17, 2017 at 15:25 UTC
    See also CPAN Tutorials.

    ($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord
}map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,

    [download]
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Re: Making the CPAN/GitHub updating process painless
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 16, 2017 at 19:24 UTC
    A tool that does it all? Caters to all idiosyncrasies? Perl? Idio^b^b^b^bHuman? I thank you :)
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