Esteemed monks,

I have a question about module dependencies in Perl. I was thinking about various modules available on CPAN, and occasionally I see "pure Perl" modules, e.g. HTTP::Server::Brick. Ostensibly, pure Perl modules have no dependencies that are not part of the core Perl distribution.

My question is this: is there a metric for measuring the "level of dependency" for a given module? (Or a script, for that matter...)

Example: "pure Perl" modules might be analogous to level zero. A module that depends only on other pure Perl modules could be a level one, and so on.

I was just curious if there is a way to measure, i.e. quantify, a module's dependency tree. I thought of this while I was saying, "Yes," to cpan asking me if I wanted to install prerequisites, then "yes" again to the prerequisites of the prerequisites, and so on. I'd like to see that list up front before installing everything.

Is there something out there than can help with this? I'd also like to measure the "levels of dependency" between a given module and the "pure Perl level" - if that makes sense.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

-MC

In reply to "Levels of Dependency"? by mercutio_viz

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.