Hi,

I'm trying to put together a process at work for building and deployment of CPAN modules. The idea is that when someone decides they need to use a CPAN module, they download it, build it, and add it to the repository of our deployment tool. The deployment tool will then copy those CPAN libraries to various boxes in various environments as needed.

This is fine (and fairly simple) for Pure Perl modules. The trouble comes with XS modules, because we're running 2 or 3 different platforms (all variations of Solaris). Obviously, these modules need to be built for each platform.

So on to my questions... Given that any module may have an XS module somewhere in it's dependency chain, do I have to keep a separate set of all the libraries for each platform (rather than only the XS ones)? I want to let CPAN.pm resolve and build all the depedencies, but as far as I know, I can't tell it not to build XS modules, so I can do those manually for each of the platforms.

There's also the problem that at some point a new platform may be added. When that happens, we need to build all the modules for that platform. Our current solution is to have a big make file which supposedly builds the right version of everything. In reality, this never works, and someone has to spend days manually building all the modules. Is there a good way to solve this?

Any other general advice on how to manage XS modules on multiple platforms?