Re: Where to put the bits and pieces - Installing a complex CPAN dist

I'm only a humble user of Debian and Perl so please take my suggestions a if I know very little

Put the demos and demo conf in a pod. Then you could have Your::Module::Demo and Your::Module::Demo::Conf, assuming you have Your::Module of course.

You would also have Your::Module::Conf to discuss the default configuration and Your::Module would have to indicate these other pods exist.

The demos and their confs as distinct files could also end up in a sub dir of /usr/share/doc/libyourmodule-perl/. As could any info about the default conf. That's where I might expect to look for them anyway.

As for the shared stuff there are share directories used by many perl modules e.g. /usr/share/perl/5.8.8, /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.8 and /usr/share/perl5 with rules as to what goes where.

Then you could consider a web site to show the documentation again

Best I can offer I'm afraid - if I am understanding correctly what you are asking of course.

Comment on Re: Where to put the bits and pieces - Installing a complex CPAN dist

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Re^2: Where to put the bits and pieces - Installing a complex CPAN dist by Hercynium (Hermit) on Sep 19, 2008 at 16:11 UTC
Thank you for your input - Debian tends to be my "gold standard" for correct packaging, and it seems that most of the Perl community agrees. To try to clarify, the demo scripts are just that - scripts, and they use config files that the modules will look for on the system (the search path is fully configurable). Each script has it's own config file. In the case of this distro, applications written using the modules will need to load config files and so I think the appropriate location is in /etc/$distname or /usr/local/etc/$distname. System defaults (like the search-path and various default behaviors) are stored in a module generated by Module::Build, but those can be overridden by any application's config. I'm wondering if I should put the demo configs under an etc directory as well, or should they be sequestered under a /usr/share sort of place. Perhaps I should put them under /usr/share and install into /usr/bin a script that the user could run later that copies the demo configs and scripts from there to /etc? After packaging it correctly, my goal for this distro is to make it as easy as possible for people to use and try out. It's been used in production for years now, but the author always custom-installed it, usually placing things wherever seemed good for that particular instance. Now we both want to see this software with a broader user-base, and my opinion is that a distro must install properly, right from CPAN, or 99.9% of users will give up and never look back. "Properly" includes putting things in places that are accessible and expected by the users and won't annoy sysadmins who run a tight ship (ARRRRRR!)	[reply]
Re^3: Where to put the bits and pieces - Installing a complex CPAN dist by LesleyB (Friar) on Sep 20, 2008 at 23:57 UTC
It's always difficult to really be sure but I think the standard form is to put demo scripts and their config files in `/usr/share/doc/<package-name>/demo` and `/usr/share/doc/<package-name>/demo/conf` directories. I think tucked away with the default config in /etc would be the wrong place - not even exim4, spamassassin or clamav do that. I think that `/etc` or `/usr/local/etc` is the right place for an active config or set of configs for an installed system. (My `/usr/local/etc` happens to be empty on two systems.) Pod could always point out the existence of the `/usr/share/doc/<package-name>/demo` directories and even discuss their contents as well as that of the default install I think that is fairly general Linux behaviour - at least what I have seen of Debian, SuSE, Mandriva and Ubuntu - and so not entirely limited to Debian. The FHS says `/usr/local/etc` is for host specific configuration files for local binaries. I don't know if your application falls into that category. Nightmare with all the different possibilities, though -- I can't imagine where things go in Windows... or a Mac . Good luck	[reply] [d/l] [select]