note rinceWind <p>As you have implied in your first sentence, CPAN is all about distributions. There's more to a distribution than shipping code that the user can run. There's documentation, tests, examples, and control files that help you verify that your distribution is complete. A standalone script wouldn't have all, or indeed any of this provided.</p> <p>The traditional way of distributing a script is as a standalone file that needs to be copied into a special place, e.g. a cgi-bin directory. There may be some manual configuring required with an editor, to set variables to contain real paths on the target machine. As a potential user, putting the script live is a great leap of faith. There's no reassurance that it will work with the configuration of the machine on which it's being installed.</p> <p>A much better idea is to put all your functionality into one or more .pm files, and ship a bare bones script that calls the module(s). The reason why it's better is that you can write tests that call the module API and exercise the code completely.</p> <p>The installer of your distribution gets to run tests of the module's functionality <strong>during</strong> the installation process, and is instantly made aware of any problems, <strong>before</strong> the module is installed. This becomes even more important when it comes to upgrading an existing installation.</p> <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-144850"> <p><small>--<br />Apprentice [http://www.innercompass.co.uk/|wetware hacker]</small></p> </div></div> 606296 606296