Please God no. Module::Build (0.23, Mac OS 10.2.8, Perl 5.8.3) has been a plague to me by failing to work with CPAN installs, while ExtUtils::MakeMaker has always treated me well. Maybe there are good reasons to head toward M::B, but from looking at the "motivation" section of the POD, I'm not so convinced. (Disclaimer: I am not, nor have I ever been, a Windows user.)

It claims that "Perl is said to be a language for system administration. Could it really be the case that Perl isn't up to the task of building and installing software?" This absolutely grates -- Perl is about text manipulation and system administration, but it's also about gluing existing parts together. If there's a tried-and-true wheel out there, Perl can usually take advantage of it, rather than having to reinvent it. Even if M::B is made to work as well as make at the moment, it will lead to a constant duplication of effort as platforms change, so long as other projects continue to use make, and therefore keep it up-to-date. As it says in the M::B docs, "It is risky to make major changes to MakeMaker, since it does so many things, is so important, and generally works." So on the one hand, there is crufty code; on the other hand, I appreciate its "generally working." (This sounds like a Perl 5/6 comparison in some ways, and I see neither an effort to convert people to Perl 6 by subtle default, nor a cry that they adopt it simply "because it's new".)

For people who need to do elaborate tweaks to the build process, M::B sounds like a definite improvement. But for the rest of us, and certainly for most users of Module::Simple, EU::MM will minimize pain to both author and users.


In reply to Re: Re: Module::Starter, a helper for new module authors by educated_foo
in thread Module::Starter, a helper for new module authors by petdance

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