Re: APP Distribution via CPAN

["Emmanuel Rodriguez" <emmanuel rodriguez gmail com>]

On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 5:21 PM, Mario Kemper
<mario kemper googlemail com> wrote:
> I am really interested in distributing my app via CPAN as well
> ( currently i am doing the packaging for supported linux distributions
> on my own - too much work ;-) ).
> Are there any good tutorials how to do this and what tools to use? I am
> familiar with packaging CPAN modules for debian based linux
> distributions and i am aware of the benefits.
>
> How do i prepare my app for CPAN? Just like any other Module? Where are
> the differences?
As far as I know a CPAN Perl application is packaged the same way as a
module. This has some major drawbacks specially for graphical user
interfaces where the application needs to bundle extra files (images,
translation files, templates,etc). The CPAN philosophy is to add this
extra files to the same folder where the modules get stored. This is
far from ideal and doesn't follow the Open Source guidelines.

> I can image the dependency handling of CPAN based modules but how are
> any needed C Libs handled by this? Package names differ between most
> linux distributions...How are these dependencies resolved?
CPAN modules don't have an 'official' way for listing dependencies on
C libraries. The Gtk2 Perl bindings rely on ExtUtils::PkgConfig which
does a very good job and should be portable across different OSes.

You can take a look at my application
(http://code.google.com/p/xacobeo/). It's packaged as a CPAN module
and deals with external files as expected (/usr/share instead of
/usr/lib/perl). There's also Zim (http://zim-wiki.org/) that is
packaged as a CPAN module, this application helped me a lot to fight
with the CPAN packaging.

Please share all your findings with us.
-- 
Emmanuel Rodriguez