On Aug 4, 2008, at 04:14, Shlomi Fish wrote:
Um, nothing has to parse Build.PL.
Parse and modify Build.PL
I agree with you: nothing should do that.
So you agree that I should not edit META.yml directly?
Yes.
In this case I want
something machine-readable as input to M::B, which will eventually
end up at
META.yml where the CPAN interfaces can find it.
Why? The META itself is machine-readable.
Ah. But if I want to make it machine-readable, then I'll need a YAML
(or
whatever) file which will in turn be read by Meta-Build.PL which
will run
Build.PL with all of these command line args. This will add more
complexity,
and will be probelamtic if someone runs Build.PL directly.
You're already talking about adding complexity, and I don't understand
why.
Why?
Because I want to
Um, okay. Suit yourself. That doesn't mean it should be in M::B itself.
Yep, that's what the command-line arguments are for.
Ah. But I need to remember to append them to Build.PL everytime. If
it's
written in a file somewhere under the local directory it would be less
error-prone.
That's what shell scripts are for. And aliases. Or batch files, if
that's your thing.
But a patch demonstrating what you want would probably be more
convincing, in that we could much better understand what it is you
want.
I think I can accomplish that using a sub-class, so that will be my
first
lead. I'll also do it TDD-style, so you can understand what I mean
using the
tests.
As a side note, we really should get some sort of plugin or callback
architecture into M::B. Maybe I'll work on that after the next
release. Then we can discourage subclassing.
Anyway, I still don't understand what problem you're trying to solve.
I understand the solution, but not the problem.
Take tags, for example. As things currently stand, a module author can
specify keywords in Build.PL, and they will be put into META.yml. Both
of these files are for the module author to manage, not anyone else.
So the author uploads the module to CPAN with the keywords in the
META.yml file, and the code for search.cpan.org or some other site can
index the META.yml data in its own database, and then, if it wishes,
provide its own interface for site users to tag distributions. These
tags would not be added to META.yml.
So the way it works is that the module author puts stuff into
Build.PL, and M::B generates META.yml based on that. No one other than
the module author should edit Build.PL or generate META.yml. So who
else needs to edit a file that determines stuff that goes into
META.yml? The module author can just use Build.PL, which is easy, but
I see no need for anyone else to do that.
You, however, it seems, do, otherwise you wouldn't want a machine-
readable file to feed to Build.PL to affect the output of META.yml. So
who are these people, and why are they doing this?
IOW, what problem are you trying to solve?
Best,
David
