Ken Williams wrote:
On Oct 5, 2006, at 5:50 AM, Ron Savage wrote:
Of course I don't expect Data::Package to tell me that a dependency
requires
compilation, although dare I say that should be the goal of this first
step.
Yeah, I agree. Probably this will be best handled by the higher-level
tools like CPAN and/or PAUSE and/or PAR and/or PPM. Module::Build can
help each distro specify what its dependencies are and whether it
requires a compiler, and the higher-level tools can string that
information together and report what's necessary to the user.
So, there are a couple of different ways we could frame this. We could
add a narrow-ish flag like 'needs_compiler'. Or we could try to
automatically put it right in the prereq section as 'build_requires'
information. This could either be by adding 'ExtUtils::CBuilder' as a
'build_requires' item, or by specifying somehow that M::B needs to have
the 'C_support' feature enabled.
If you are looking at implementation from the code-side, you need have
two capabilities.
1. Detect compiler availability
2. Enforce compiler dependency
It's common enough to not have a compiler that a number of cases exist
where the compiler is checked for and alternative deps used if there is
no compiler.
From the META.yml side, assuming it's possible to add something to that
that isn't totally useless (because not only does it suffer from the
advisory-quality-only issue, but it does so recursively as well) you
want a flag that isn't boolean.
It needs to be something like
needs_compiler: never
needs_compiler: always
needs_compiler: sometimes
That sort of trinary logic (yes|no|maybe) might be a suitable way of
handling this...
Adam K
