in reply to Module Publishing Dilemma

First, as GrandFather points out, CPAN is much more oriented towards archival of modules. However, nothing prevents a module from having scripts that invoke their behaviour. For example, Mail::SpamAssassin. This module provides not only some modules that do the work of the Spam Assassin, but they provide a convenient script that invokes it from the command line.

Next, the namespace. I'm not sure - there is the Project namespace that this may fit well.

Finally, the distribution must do that bit. Of course, how a distro does this is distro-dependant. Gentoo is very community-based, if you provide an ebuild, they'll probably put it in (there may be some red tape - I've never tried this before). RedHat, however, seems entirely closed. I suspect Debian to be closer to Gentoo on this than RedHat, but I've never actually used that distro. I, personally, would recommend ignoring this, and instead document the CPAN interface for getting your code - after all, users will have to have perl installed first anyway, so grabbing your stuff via CPAN probably won't be a huge hardship.

Hope that helps,

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Re^2: Module Publishing Dilemma
by ait (Hermit) on Sep 05, 2006 at 02:18 UTC
    Thanks. I will look into Mail::SpamAssassin for ideas. A friend had already recommended I use the Project namespace but I wanted some examples of modules that are actually applications with front-end scripts. Perhaps I should have phrased the question as simple as that.... but as I heard Steve Jobs say one day "...you can _only_ connect the dots looking backwards..."

    Thanks, again!