[pacman-dev] perl module repo

[Aaron Griffin]

On 10/17/06, Charles Mauch <cmauch at taclug.org> wrote:
> The build process is fairly error-free at this point, though it took more
> than a week of hacking to get it error-free. :)
>
> The process works something like this....
>
> 1.  Every night my cpan modules list is updated via a cron job.
> 2.  About 30 minutes later, I scrape the above url for modules to build.
> 3.  If there is a difference between the cpan module version and the repo
>     version, the module is built, and a build-report is generated.
> 4a. The next morning I commit any changes to the repo via svn.
> 4b. I have code ready to auto-commit changes to the repo, but I'd like
>     let things run for a week or two before I allow the script to bypass
>     the last vestiges of human control of the process. :)

This is rather ingenious.  I actually think this makes far more sense
than what I had in mind.  I'm sure Xentac has a comment or two on
this.

The idea I had was to use the libalpm bindings to create a perl
frontend which grabbed things from CPAN and wrote db information upon
install.  This would tie together with some meta naming.... i.e.
perl:libxml would call the perl plugin.

This is actually a superior idea IMO, and could be extended infinitely
(to python, et al) and not require a complex plugin system in pacman
to do this.

Could you please publish your scripts and any changes you made somewhere?

> It will be great to see cpan or cpanplus integrated into pacman, but I
> think this works as a great near-term solution or a long-term alternative.

Just out of curiosity, what would be the benefit, in your eyes, of
integrating cpan directly into pacman rather than auto-generating
packages like this?