On Tuesday, March 25, 2003, at 09:43 PM, Stas Bekman wrote:
Currently CPAN.pm has a special logic to make sure that if a requested package is found in the core perl distribution and in another package, that another package takes the precedence if its VERSION number is the same or higher than the VERSION number of that package in the core perl distro.
Now I working on a helper package for mod_perl CPAN modules (to reduce the craft in Makefile.PL) and I want it to be on CPAN, but also include it in the mod_perl 1.0 and 2.0 core (also living on CPAN). I foresee a problem with CPAN.pm, as it's going to see the same package in 3 different packages and which is going to be picked by CPAN.pm is undefined, since we have no special case logic for mod_perl-core packages. And we don't want CPAN.pm to try to install mod_perl 1.0, when I just want to fetch that single package.
[snip]
My recommendation would be to not include the helper package in the two core packages, and to just add it as a dependency. Even if CPAN were changed in the way you suggest, it wouldn't work properly with people's stock CPANs, and it seems bad for mod_perl to depend on a certain version of CPAN.
As Andreas correctly points out, it's the indexer thing, not the client CPAN.pm or CPANPLUS. So this change is transparent to users having whatever version of CPAN/CPANPLUS they have.
First of all this is a more generic problem than in my particular case, we already have this problem with all packages living in the core and separately on the CPAN. The indexer introduces a special case for perl core. Now think of the mod_perl distro, as the perl core distro, do we introduce a special case here? And if tomorrow a new big distro needs this functionality, do they ask for a special case as well? That's too much of a hassle for Andreas IMHO.
Back to our particular problem.
We want to minimize the dependencies to zero, so a user downloading mod_perl already has all the critical packages. The reason I want to redistribute some of these packages separately on CPAN is for mod_perl 1.0 users, so they can download these packages without needing to install mod_perl 2.0.
In particular we have the Apache::Test suite which lives in the mod_perl 2.0 source distro, but since it also works with mod_perl 1.0 or any Apache module (C/Perl/PHP/etc), it should have its own life on CPAN.
Now I'm working on a new module for CPAN 3rd party Apache:: developers, which should make the writing of Makefile.PL's a much easier task, which is currently not simple at all if your module has XS and needs to support both version of mod_perl, and different testing suites (Apache::test and Apache::Test). So I was planning to include this module in both mod_perl distros and on CPAN separately, so those with older mod_perl versions can install it via PREREQ_PM.
While we can suggest using CPAN::MakeMaker for the latter case, since this module is going to be small. Apache::Test is a big package (50k tar.gz) and bundling it with every Apache:: CPAN package would be a waste of space and bandwidth.
__________________________________________________________________ Stas Bekman JAm_pH ------> Just Another mod_perl Hacker http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide ---> http://perl.apache.org mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://use.perl.org http://apacheweek.com http://modperlbook.org http://apache.org http://ticketmaster.com
