To answer your question about the ppd file lets look at the content of one.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<SOFTPKG NAME="ABI" VERSION="0,01,0,0">
  <ABSTRACT>Perl module to parse chromatogram files generated by Appli
+ed Biosystems (ABI) automated DNA sequencing machine.</ABSTRACT>
  <AUTHOR>Malay Kumar Basu (mbasu@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)</AUTHOR>
  <IMPLEMENTATION>
    <ARCHITECTURE NAME="MSWin32-x86-multi-thread-5.8" />
    <CODEBASE HREF="MSWin32-x86-multi-thread-5.8/ABI-0.01.tar.gz" />
    <OS NAME="MSWin32" />
  </IMPLEMENTATION>
  <TITLE>ABI</TITLE>
</SOFTPKG>

[download]

The ppd file is similiar to CPAN's meta.yml file. It is used by ppm to get information about the package, what platform the package has been bundled for (since different OS's use different compilers) and the version of the software you want to install.

A don't know of a ppm utility for making sure that you can make yourself a personal repository with only the most current modules. Personally I don't like ppm at all, it has too many issues and it drives me nuts. It has driven me more towards Linux (and CPAN) more than anything else has been able too.

Edited by planetscape - changed pre tags to code tags

( keep:1 edit:5 reap:0 )

In reply to Re: Building a local 'ppm' repository (Windows) by Herkum
in thread Building a local 'ppm' repository (Windows) by LittleGreyCat

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