Tom Christianson and/or Nathan Torkington seem to think this is a good idea, as they advocate this technique in the Perl Cookbook. I haven't tried it, but it looks like it takes care of a bunch of boring crap automagically (creating directories and a module skeleton along with other stuff). The syntax they recommend is: h2xs -XA -n Foo X suppresses the creation of XS components, the A says that the module won't use the autoloader, and the -n flag marks the name of the module.

TGI says moo

My worry is that the "boring crap" very often ends up being either "important crap" or "useless-gets-in-the-way crap". If a module that was solely for internal use and now needs to be distributed in a CPAN-like way, take the time to learn why the MANIFEST (for example) is desirable. The second and subsequent times, use h2xs, by all means.

I guess I'm old-fashioned. I feel that people should know at least the basics of the tools they're using. *shrugs*

Good point--makes me think of my calculus teacher that required that we prove that the derivative shortcuts in our text were valid before we could use them. However having a nice clean distro skeleton to look at can be a real asset when your are studying the anatomy of modules.

My philosophy is to avoid autogenerated code that I don't understand. But I've learned a lot in various enviroments by disecting autogenerated code.


TGI says moo