Re: Starting the development of a module : thoughts

[btrott]

Here are some additional thoughts/steps.

• h2xs automatically creates a MANIFEST file. I don't use it; I delete it. I like using 'make manifest', because it automatically generates a MANIFEST file for me when I want it. To do this, set up a MANIFEST.SKIP file. Here's an example of a standard one I use:

      \bCVS\b
      ^MANIFEST\.
      ^Makefile$
      ~$
      \.old$
      ^blib/
      ^pm_to_blib$
      \.tar\.gz$
  

  With this in place, I don't have to maintain a list of all my files; 'make manifest' will start at the current directory and assemble a list of all files not matching the patterns in MANIFEST.SKIP, then write the names of those files to MANIFEST.

  So, to create a new distribution, I can do:

      perl Makefile.PL
      make manifest
      make dist
  

  I keep my MANIFEST.SKIP under source control but that's not really necessary.

• What is 'make build'? My Makefiles don't have a 'build' target.

• You might also want to get into some of the interesting things you can do with a Makefile.PL. You can make it sort of a 'configure' for your distribution.

  As an example, the Makefile.PL for Net::SSH::Perl lets the user choose whether to install the prereqs for SSH-1 or SSH-2 (or both), which means that if the user really only wants SSH-1 support, he/she doesn't have to install a bunch of modules he/she doesn't need. Of course, this also means you have to learn to love using require in your code, for runtime loading of modules. :)

  Another useful Makefile.PL "trick" is to a "does user have this module installed?" function:

      sub have_mod {
          my($mod, $ver) = @_;
          eval("use $mod" . ($ver ? " $ver;" : ";"));
          !$@;
      }
  

  This allows you to do your own prerequisite checking in Makefile.PL, because unfortunately, the prereq checking in the CPAN module depends on having an explicit list of args to PREREQ_PM; it actually parses your Makefile.PL to look for such a list. If you have, for example, this:

      PREREQ_PM => \%prereq,
  

  then it won't pick up the list of prereqs correctly. So if that list is dynamic, then you may need to do your own checking.