A distribution is generally a unit of installation. It may contain several modules, where perhaps only some are used at runtime by your code. Modules are generally units of functionality, and the author of a module distro may have decided that some set of functionality is so closely related (and maybe have so much common code) that it's worth distributing all in one piece.

A bundle (now also called Task) is a convenience "metadistribution" that triggers, via the dependency mechanism of CPAN/CPANPLUS, the installation of more that one distribution. This is typically used for optional but common functionality. For example, you can install the CPAN shell itself without any readline support, but commonly you'd like that and all the other goodies, so the one command "cpan Bundle::CPAN" will save you some pick-n-choosing.

Another example is the Pugs smoke tests. Those are completely optional—all you need to install Pugs is basically a reasonably recentish Perl 5—but if you do want to run the nice graphical smokes, Task::Smoke makes it easy to fetch and install anything you need, despite not containing any code of its own.

In reply to Re: CPAN: modules, distributions, and bundles by gaal
in thread CPAN: modules, distributions, and bundles by j3

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.