[Chicago-talk] CPAN prereq

Edward Summers ehs at pobox.com
Fri Oct 28 10:02:28 PDT 2005


On Oct 27, 2005, at 9:00 PM, Jay Strauss wrote:

> I'm building my first CPAN module.  Is there a way to learn all the
> dependences of a module, or do I need to build a clean box, and do  
> trial
> by error, till I get the prerequisite list?

Well since you wrote the code you probably know what non-core modules  
you used. It's not your responsibility as the module author to delve  
into the dependencies of your initial dependencies.

So for example let's say your module has Net::Amazon as a dependency-- 
you don't have to include: Log::Log4perl, XML::Simple,  
LWP::UserAgent, Time::HiRes and URI as dependencies in your  
Makefile.PL. The cpan shell will follow them for you.

One really nice thing about the perl developer community is the  
testing infrastructure that has grown out of CPAN. When you initially  
upload your module you'll get back smoke reports via email which  
detail how the installation went on different systems [1]. This can  
often help you discover missing dependencies that need to be itemized  
in your Makefile.PL.

If you're not sure what modules you've used I'd grep for 'use '  
statements, and run them through Module::Corelist [2] to figure out  
if you want to include it or not.

//Ed

[1] http://testers.cpan.org
[2] http://search.cpan.org/dist/Module-CoreList


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