I think no. :) If (like me) you haven't used MM yet, I think it would make more sense to learn it in a context of actually putting together a perl module for distribution, since that is what MM was created to do, primarily, and its man page includes lots of details and external references about things that apply only to porting, building and installing perl modules.

But you're talking about a database normalize/port task, which is rather different, and depends primarily on the database engine(s) at each end of the porting process, and on the (theoretical and actual) specs for the database schema you're dealing with.

You could probably find useful things in the "Test::*" namespace on CPAN, but it's not clear to me that ExtUtils::MakeMaker itself, as a whole, gives you much of a direct and relevant head-start.

update (forgot to mention): I don't understand why you would expect "a wrapper full of system calls" to be a sensible alternative. Wouldn't you be using perl/DBI to pull data out of the legacy db, maybe store it to appropriate (tab- or comma-delimited value) files, analyze the content of each table, and build a modified set of files for loading into the new db? (Of course, upon creating the properly normalized/ported data for each target table, you'd use your db's native import tool to load them.) Maybe some unix tools (cut/sort/uniq) could speed things up a bit for large quantities of data -- that's a judgment call that can't be made based on what you've told us.

In reply to Re: organizing/ running non-module related tests by graff
in thread organizing/ running non-module related tests by geektron

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