http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1011109


in reply to What are the files in a CPAN distribution?

Tobyink, Thanks for this Perl Meditation. It's really useful, as were several of the comments.

Corion, do you think a .gitignore file is sufficient, or do you feel that a MANIFEST.SKIP is the only "right" way?

--
Tommy
$ perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print decode_base64 "YWNlQHRvbW15YnV0bGVyLm1lCg=="'

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Re^2: What are the files in a CPAN distribution?
by tobyink (Canon) on Jan 01, 2013 at 09:16 UTC

    .gitignore and MANIFEST.SKIP serve different purposes.

    • MANIFEST.SKIP tells the distribution building process (as far as I know EU:MM, M:B and M:I all support it) to skip including certain files in the packaged distribution.

    • .gitignore (and equivalents for other versioning systems: .hgignore files or svn:ignore properties) tell your version control system to keep particular files out of version control.

    It's quite common to have files that are not in version control. but are packaged with the distribution, such as META.yml which might be built on the fly at packaging time. Conversely there are occasions in which you'd want to keep files in your repository but not distribute them - a Devel::Cover database, editor config files (.vimrc), benchmarking scripts, etc. So it's fairly usual to have significant differences between the .gitignore and MANIFEST.SKIP lists.

    perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'
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      Thank you. I can see what you mean. It didn't occur to me I guess, because I haven't ever kept anything in my dev tree that didn't go into the package; I keep such things higher up in the tree than the directory that gets built.

      Now you've got me thinking... again.

      --
      Tommy
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