On 06/02/2010 00:28, Aaron Griffin wrote:
Message below is trimmed, but the summary is: pacpan (CPAN wrapper for pacman packages) has been updated with gusto. There is a request to include using pacpan as part of the official guidelines for packaging perl apps for Arch. I think this is a good idea, but it leaves me wondering what we should do with the tool itself - should we be hosting it in the git repos?
What do you guys think?
This is an area where I have a pretty solid experience, as as perl dev, arch user, and maintainer of several perl packages in extra and community. I tend to agree with Allan here. We should only package and take into consideration what on CPAN is called a distribution, i.e. a tarball containing a bunch or related perl modules. The mapping between modules and distributions is available in a plain text database on each CPAN mirror, and can be figured out by the common tools used to install cpan stuff from the command-line (cpan and cpanp). I think it is quite a BAD idea to put all module names in the provides array, as this can easily yield hundreds of elements without obvious advantage I can think of. Our poor lil Pacman has better things to do than take that overload into account. That said, I do acknowledge Xyne's effort! I have written a very similar tool years ago, which is still available in AUR (perl-cpanplus-pacman), but for which I have alas not dedicated as much effort and commitment as Xyne did with pacpan. My own approach has however inspired another project, called perl-cpanplus-dist-arch (also in AUR), which IMHO is superior to both my own cpan4pacman and Xyne's pacpan. (That said I still use cpan4pacman (together with a few helper shell scripts and the devtools) to maintain my own local repository of 550 CPAN packages, all of which I keep uptodate with relative ease). So -1 from me: the added complexity this proposal would bring clearly outweighs its advantages! But OTOH I am fine with the idea of hosting pacpan on git, it is a good tool. I just don't want the policy it adheres to become our official one. F