Re^2: CPAN: modules, distributions, and bundles

A distribution is generally a unit of installation. It may contain several modules, where perhaps only some are used at runtime by your code.

Is a single module distributed via CPAN generically referred to as a "distribution" per se? Or is that term specifically only applied to cases where a minimum of 2 or more modules are distributed bundled together?

When you upload an archive to CPAN, are you offered a choice between uploading either a "module" or a "distribution"?

Comment on Re^2: CPAN: modules, distributions, and bundles

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Re^3: CPAN: modules, distributions, and bundles by gaal (Parson) on Nov 04, 2006 at 06:36 UTC
Perl 5 the language doesn't strictly have the concept of a module: it has a "package", and even that bears only somewhat weak conventional overlap with a single file. A module on the other hand seems to be, by conventional usage, the unit of consumption by code. Since a distribution almost always also comes with additional files such as `Makefile.PL`, documentation, a changelog, metadata regarding prerequisites and licensing etc., and since CPAN attempts to make it easy to manage these units of software, you upload distributions, not modules, even if your distro has a single `.pm` file in it. (Incidentally, Perl 6 does have a "module" keyword, which encapsulates namespacing just like packages do, but adds versioning to the story. No doubt software will continue to have private namespaces not meant to be consumed by the user code directly, and perhaps the author of those would choose to use modules and not packages to contain them, but I'm betting programmers will continue to loosely talk about "installing that module" when in fact more than one may have been involved. (Then again, Perl 6 has lexically scoped namespaces, so if in the middle of my module I decide I need to implement a Parser, I can do "`my package Parser {...}`" and my stuff will not clash with any Parser namespace that was visible to you, where you had called me.))	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re^3: CPAN: modules, distributions, and bundles
by gaal (Parson) on Nov 04, 2006 at 06:36 UTC

by code

Makefile.PL

manage

.pm

(Incidentally, Perl 6 does have a "module" keyword, which encapsulates namespacing just like packages do, but adds versioning to the story. No doubt software will continue to have private namespaces not meant to be consumed by the user code directly, and perhaps the author of those would choose to use modules and not packages to contain them, but I'm betting programmers will continue to loosely talk about "installing that module" when in fact more than one may have been involved. (Then again, Perl 6 has lexically scoped namespaces, so if in the middle of my module I decide I need to implement a Parser, I can do "my package Parser {...}" and my stuff will not clash with any Parser namespace that was visible to you, where you had called me.))

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