Hi list,as most of you probably know, during PAR build time (perl Makefile.PL), it offers to fetch a binary PAR release from CPAN if no C compiler was found. This is the case on more or less all Windows machines.
Most of this behavior is implemented in a little-known (because as of yet undocumented) Module::Install extension named Module::Install::PAR. I wrote some documentation yesterday and made some trivial changes to the code. I suppose it might end up in the next release of Module::Install, but I have not gotten feedback from Audrey or Adam yet.
That means if you are using Module::Install for one of your CPAN distributions, you can now add optional binary loading with just a couple of lines of code in your Makefile.PL. They could look like this:
par_base 'YOUR_CPAN_ID';
unless ( can_cc() ) { # no C compiler?
extract_par( fetch_par() );
}
This should work with the current module install if you add arguments to
fetch_par: fetch_par() becomes fetch_par('', '').
'Work' here means that this code will fetch a file named YOUR-DISTRO-VERSION-ARCHITECTURE-PERL_VERSION.par from your CPAN directory.
Of course, asking the user whether he wants to use a binary might be a good idea. For details, please look at the POD documentation in the attached, modified Module::Install::PAR.pm
It is also possible to add custom logic that changes the name of the file downloaded from CPAN.
When is this all a good idea?- If you have an XS module that is difficult to compile on a particular platform, you could provide binaries via CPAN. - If you need certain dynamic libraries that are difficult to install on a platform, you might be able to include them in the binary. - You are running a CPAN::Mini mirror and inject your organizations private packages, this might make deployment on a limited set of platforms much smoother. (I wish I had had that idea when I faced the deployment nightmare.)
When is this not a good idea at all?- For any pure-perl module on CPAN which installs cleanly on most or all platforms anyway.
- The last point covers > 98% of CPAN, of course.Do you think this would be worthwhile to extend beyond just Module::Install based distributions? (I.e. write a Module::Build subclass or similar.)
Documented and fixed Module::Install::PAR attached. Thanks for reading, Steffen
PAR.pm
Description: Perl program
