It's weird how things happen. I'd been spending the last couple days
implementing the self-installation parts of Inline-0.50. It was all
working out quite well. Friday afternoon I was cranking out the code
when suddenly I was swept away on a magical bicycle ride. A bunch of
people dressed in ridiculous halloween costumes all riding bicycles
suddenly showed up at the cafe where I was hacking. Being a bike lover
myself I couldn't resist. They led me on to gigantic halloween Critical
Mass ride with thousands of people choking the busy streets of downtown
Portland. It would be 3am before I would return safely home.
Somewhere in that madness a thought flickered through my brain. "Why not
extend the magic of Inline::MakeMaker to be generally useful?" Saturday
morning I awoke with a terrible hangover. I knew what I must do.
CPAN::MakeMaker. Available on CPAN now.
As I was finishing the module, my mind returned to Inline-0.50, and I
realized it was no longer necessary. All of the logic needed to get
Inline onto the systems that need it can be put into CPAN::MakeMaker.
Isn't that weird?
I'm going to try a little experiment. After Inline-0.44 goes out, I'm
going to switch to using CPAN::MakeMaker for Inline-0.45-TRIAL1. I've
already tried it on my copy of Inline, and it worked the first time.
The CPAN::MakeMaker README is below.
Cheers, Brian
PS I'd appreciate is a Win32 and a Cygwin user could try running C<make
test> for CPAN::MakeMaker and letting me know what happens.
----- Forwarded message from Brian Ingerson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -----
From: Brian Ingerson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2002 17:29:39 -0800
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: ANNOUNCE: CPAN-MakeMaker-0.10
User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i
CPAN/MakeMaker version 0.10
===========================
The module ExtUtils::MakeMaker is familiar to everybody. It's on the
first line of every Makefile.PL of every module distribution on CPAN.
The good thing about ExtUtils::MakeMaker is that it is powerful,
featureful, flexible, cross-platform and on virtually every installation
of Perl 5. The bad thing about this legacy workhorse is that the Perl
community is crippled to significantly improve it. Any features added
now can only enhance the current release of Perl. Authors would shun new
features anyway, because their modules could not be used in earlier
versions of Perl that account for the overwhelming majority of
installations.
Unfortunately, ExtUtils::MakeMaker is also stuck with a suboptimal
interface for new Perl authors. Writing a good Makefile.PL requires an
unnecessary level of expertise. Although anything is possible, some
seemingly simple tasks (like distributing scripts) involve a lot of
setup. Complicating the matter is the fact that there is no API for
accessing many of the powerful internals of ExtUtils::MakeMaker.
CPAN::MakeMaker changes everything.
This module is a drop-in replacement for ExtUtils::MakeMaker.
CPAN::MakeMaker works exactly like its legacy counterpart, but it makes
a lot of simple things easier, and some harder things possible.
CPAN::MakeMaker is a self-distributing module. Only the people who want
to create a Perl module or script distribution need to install it. The
first time you run your Makefile.PL, CPAN::MakeMaker will attach itself
to your distribution. The people who end up installing your distribution
don't even need to have into on their system at all. It just works.
You should be able to switch any of your existing module distributions
to CPAN::MakeMaker by simply changing the line:
use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;
to:
use CPAN::MakeMaker;
And then run the command 'perl Makefile.PL'. Everything should
just work as before, but now you can take advantage of
CPAN::MakeMaker's additional features. See the CPAN::MakeMaker
documentation for more details.
Make the Switch!
NEW FEATURES
0.10:
- Initial Release
INSTALLATION
To install this module type the following:
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install
COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE
Copyright (C) 2002 Brian Ingerson
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself.
----- End forwarded message -----
