NAME
CPAN::Porters - resource for people maintaining packages of CPAN modules
in various distributions
SYNOPSIS
CPAN modules can be either installed from source (downloaded directly
from CPAN) or they can be installed with the package mangement system of
your distribution.
CPAN::Porters is a resource for people who are maintaining those
packages in the various distributions.
Reasoning
When developing an application we usually don't want to build our own
machine. Neither compile our own kernel. In most of the cases we won't
want to compile and install our own version of a database engine nor
Apache or any other 3rd party tool. So my assumption is that we won't
want to install our CPAN dependencies either. Again - in the standard
case.
For people just using an application written in Perl it is even more
important that they should not deal with all these packages. Most of us
know how much people suffer when they need to install 10s of modules and
their dependencies from CPAN. Especially for modules with dependencies
outside of CPAN.
While CPAN.pm, CPANPLUS.pm have improved a lot they still cannot deal
with cases when one of the dependencies fails to install cleanly.
In addition while we usually want to work with recent versions of
modules from CPAN, we usually don't want to get the bleeding edge.
Espcially not in applications.
General resources
Statistics about CPAN modules in
the various distributions
Related mailing lists
Module Authors:
Perl QA and the mailing list
CPAN Testers
CPAN Discuss http://lists.cpan.org/showlist.cgi?name=cpan-discuss
Guidelines for inclusion
In addition to the guidelines of each distribution on which module to
include, when to upgrade etc. we would like to setup our own guidelines
to help people decide what to include, what would be the priorites, when
to upgrade a module etc.
A few guidelines on how to select and prioritize modules:
* Modules that are dependencies of another module by a different module
author.
* Modules that require compilation
* Modules that require files not on CPAN
Such modules are especially difficult to install with CPAN.pm or
CPANPLUS as they require files outside the scope of CPAN. Making
sure such modules and their dependencies can be installed with the
standard packaging system gets extra points.
* Web development frameworks
* Modules required by some of the big open source Perl applications.
For a good listing see the journal entry of brian d foy
L
Requirements for inclusion or upgrade
* The module already has all its prereq in the system
* The module passes all its tests with its prereqs currently in the
system on the system
* The tests of all the currently available dependent modules in the
system pass with this new version
* A broader requirement would be that the version has no failing test
reports on any other system, though this requirement might be too harsh
and unnecessary
Guidelines for module authors
In order to make packaging of CPAN modules for the various distros
easier module authors should create and package their module adhering to
some standards. Following is a wishlist created by the Debian Perl
module maintainers:
* Sane version numbering
While having the version in a uniform way might be nice, it would be
already helpful if one module used a consistent scheme.
That is stick try to stick to the whatever version numbering scheme
you have started.
"We have way too many modules where we have to do
{d,u}versionmangling because they switch from x.yyyy to x.yy and
x.yy.zz or stuff like that (and we try to add 00$ or strip it or
divide .xxxx into .xx.yy or something like that)."
TODO: list a few reasonable scheme here:
\d+\.\d\d(_\d\d)?
* Copyrights/licensing
Ideally each and every file in given CPAN distribution should have
clearly stated copyright and license information. AUTHORS/CHANGES
(if properly filled) can be used as a source of guessing, but I
think guessing about legal stuff is nothing we want daily.
* No interactive prompting during installation
No interactive prompting from Makefile.PL or other parts of the
build system without corresponding (and documented!) ways of setting
the same parameters automatically.
* No network access during build
no network access needed for building and testing (or an easy and
documented way to turn network tests off).
* Use standar packaging systems
Please use one of the standard Perl module build packages if at all
possible. (This probably goes without saying.)
* Structured POD
POD documentation for modules should be structured as described in
the pod2man man page. In particular, the NAME section and its
content is mandatory. Otherwise, one doesn't get a valid man page.
Make sure your POD documentation makes sense when translated with
pod2man. I went several times, i.e., over all of PDF::API2's
manpages because they used "=head1 PDF::API2::Some::Thing" instead
of "=head1 NAME". Those bugs take a _lot_ of time to properly patch!
POD is not just to be used by perldoc.
* Don't ship Makefiles
Please don't ship generated Makefiles etc.
* Testing
Don't use conditions in tests that test for the existence of author
specfic files or settings (" unless -d '.svn'" or "unless $username
eq 'timbo'")
Specifically, don't do this unless that's being used as a criteria
for skipping a test that's really meaningless outside of the
author's environment. (I do have a few tests in modules that depend
on local infrastructure to run and hence are skipped if they're not
run by me.)
Distributions
For our purposes a distribution is one if the Linux (or BSD)
distributions with its own rpm or deb (...) based packaging system. It
can also be some stand-alone Perl package such as the ActivePerl of
ActiveState or Vanilla and Strawberry Perl.
Debian
Perl Packages - the return
Building Debian Packages of Perl modules:
Debian New Maintainers' Guide
Debian Perl mailing list:
The Debian Perl Policy
The latest versions of CPAN modules built for Debian. This site is not
related to the official Debian packages. It can be good for people who
want the latest versions of CPAN modules in .deb format.
Debian Package serach tool will help finding out if a module is already
in included:
Wiki about the Debian Perl Group:
Parse::Debian::Packages
Ubuntu
My current understanding is that the best way to get CPAN modules into
Ubuntu is to get them into Debian unstable and then sync them into
Ubuntu universe.
Look at Gutsy Gibson (7.10) development forum
and more specifically
at Requesting New Packages for Inclusion in Gutsy Universe
Fedora
More details needed.
For now look at and
And the wish-list so far:
* Clearly and properly copyright your works.
* Always apply a widely used and commonly acknowledged license to your
works.
RedHat
Mandriva
MDV::Distribconf
SuSE
OpenSUSE
Gentoo
As in Gentoo the standard way is to install everything from source and
they have some way to channel all CPAN via their system for Gentoo this
whole issue is probably not relevant.
FreeBSD
NetBSD
OpenBSD
ActivePerl
ActivePerl is distribute by ActiveState
Its list of packages far exceeds of any of the other distributions
listed here. It is based on the automatic build system of ActiveState.
Strawberry and Vanilla
Sun Solaris
IBM AIX
HP-UX
TODO
* Collect the basic information for the main distributions
SEE ALSO
PIG has moved here:
cpan2dist is a script from CPANPLUS
AUTHOR
This document is maintained by Gabor Szabo