So basically, on one system after perl Makefile.PL && make or perl Build.pl && ./Build, we package the blib/ and then later on another system a suitable CPAN client can be instructed to copy the files (modules, scripts, manpages, shared files) in blib/ to the suitable location. Plus it needs to do a couple of other stuffs like appending to perllocal.pod and creating .packlist. But this saves some steps like creating Makefile, building the module and the manpages. It could be useful in slashing down installation time especially if we need to install hundreds of distros on many systems (I'm thinking from 2-4 seconds per distro, with test skipped, to under 1 second).

Yes, this won't work for some distros like ones that use dynamic configs, or contain XS modules, or do extra stuffs during configure. But for a lot of other, typical distros it should.

Some other issues: 1) no testing (but I imagine the scenario of installing lots of distros to setup lots of identical systems, so testing would not catch as much edge cases as it could).

Another idea is to build a prebuilt distro package from an installed system, by locating .packlist and creating a tarball from files listed in that file.

I'm wondering if previous effort of this has been done, or if it is considered worth it at all.

In reply to Installing distros from prebuilt files (blib/)? by perlancar

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