[Slackbuilds-users] perl-* slackbuild updates

[Thomas Morper]

On Mon, 9 Sep 2013, Bradley D. Thornton wrote:

> What are the advantages of using SBo's over that of cpan, for the
> management and installation of Perl modules, and why might I choose one
> method over the other?

When I use Perl modules, I usually need the exact same module versions on 
more than one machine (which could be different Slackware versions or have 
the gcc suite missing due to space constraints). In that case having a 
.txz from a SlackBuild makes installing, upgrading and downgrading(!) 
much, much easier than running "perl -MCPAN -e shell" everywhere and 
trying to keep everything in sync somehow. However...

The traditional SBo approach for packaging modules works fine as long as 
you don't need more than a dozen. Beyond that it gets interesting. There 
are good, yet complex modules like Catalyst or Dancer2 that have 50 or 
more dependencies. I can't imagine anyone writing a SlackBuild for each 
and everyone of it.

cpan2tgz has been around for a quite a while, but I wanted something that 
allowed more control over the result, so I took the perl template from 
SBo, made it as generic as possible, added "pre" and "post" hooks to allow 
modifications, and put the list of dependencies into a Makefile.

The maintainer still has to check search.cpan.org manually, read the 
ChangeLog, track the list of dependencies, and more. But after that it's a 
simple "make" to put everything together instead of writing / editing the 
same .SlackBuild / .info / README / slack-desc files over and over again. 

Have a look at what I call "autoperl" here:

  http://beingboiled.info/slackware/14.0/build/autoperl/

This has been working very well for me for more than two years but 
nonetheless is propably not "production ready" for everyone. Feedback on 
how to make this work for more users will be highly appreciated.

Hmm... this post isn't really and answer to your question but more like an 
extended version of the "how can I make building Perl modules more 
comfortable?" question, isn't it? Sorry for that.

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