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20040316 Tuesday March 16, 2004

Packaging a Perl module I was working on moving some old materials from a tutorial I'd given at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference onto the website. Among the materials are some code samples and among those samples are Perl modules. I wanted package them so that consumers of the materials could run the familiar "perl Makefile.PL && make && make install" cycle.

Here's the deal:
The tutorial covered SOAP interoperability between implementations in Java (using Apache Axis) and Perl (using SOAP::Lite). Some components on the Perl side required writing a few little modules. Nothing CPAN-worthy but still I wanted to package the modules nicely so users of the code samples can get the Perl side running without a lot of hand-work.

I read the man page for h2xs, the perldoc for ExtUtils::MakeMaker, I grabbed ExtUtils::ModuleMaker off of the CPAN and checked out it's docs ...the latter seems like an improvement but my needs were, IMO, real simple and I just wanted an appropriately simple set of steps. In the end, I followed a procedure similar to the one described here, bascially bootstrapping the package with structure with h2xs and manually tweaking the file system layout into something nice. Makes me wish Perl had a well defined self contained packaging structure similar to Java's jars.

Of course, then I'd want ant implemented in Perl to handle the packaging! So it goes. At the end of the day, the tutorial is at last online. ( Mar 16 2004, 09:14:49 AM PST ) Permalink