Nicholas Clark wrote:
On Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 11:50:49PM -0800, chromatic wrote:
Let me save you the trouble of writing it to find the biggest problem right
now: fairly broken automated testing systems that can't even *run* the
Build.PL file *or* the compatibility Makefile.PL yet send FAIL reports
anyway.
I believe that the following won't be a problem with PITA, but the general
smoke system really $expletive annoys me for sending FAIL reports when it
tries to build one of my XS modules on a system without a C compiler.
My opinion is that this is a BUG IN THE SMOKE SYSTEM. The default for perl
is source distribution, so to build perl it's inferred you need a C compiler.
MakeMaker and Module build already automatically handle converting any .xs or
.c files that I ship into installable modules. When creating my package, I
don't need to do anything - it *already just works*. It's already supported.
So my opinion is that it's not necessary for me to manually add to my metadata
saying "I need a C compiler". If my module ships with .c or .xs files, it's
BLOODY OBVIOUS.
In most situations yes, but I forsee some situations where there are
edge cases of this. Something that processess/scans C/XS files so it has
a collection in t/ or has examples as part of doc/ or similar.
There's also some benefit to declaring you need a C compiler, in that it
provides clearer hints to automated packaging systems (deb/rpm/ppm/etc)
that you need to compile, so they can make judgements earlier, without
every single autopackaging system being expected to go and scan the
entire tarball.
That said, I'd also like "I need libfoo 1.41" declarations and other
similar things, so we can really make the auto-packagers work some
hardcore magic.
Adam K
