question about porting CPAN Modules -> FreeBSD Ports

[Anton Berezin]

Brett,

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 07:52:21AM -0600, B. Estrade wrote:

> I lurk on the Perl6 lists, and they seem to be discussing the new
> Perl6 "CPAN," calling it "6PAN". My question is, how are CPAN modules
> currently ported to FreeBSD ports and how important would it be for
> those 'in the know' to have some input?

Currently they are mostly ported "by hand", although there exist some
semi-automatic tools to ease the (already pretty easy) process.

I believe that there were some efforts to make CPANPLUS to be able to spit
out FreeBSD port skeletons, but I do not know whether it currently has this
functionality.

> I ask because they're talking about a package model that would supposed
> allow automatic conversion to an .rpm or .deb.  Is there an equivalent
> FreeBSD "bundle," or would this still have little bearing on FreeBSD's
> Perl module ports?

The answer is "it depends".  What I've seen with regard to how people
actually use various cpan2rpm solutions (for example) was pretty much the
following model:  a company has a policy that everything should be installed
via the native packaging mechanism;  there is no package for a particular
module;  cpan2rpm gets used.  I would venture to guess that the use of such
tools to create packages of CPAN modules for inclusion into a particular
Linux distributions is pretty limited, although I would not know for sure.

In FreeBSD land we have an advantage of having a very active group of people
who make ports out of CPAN modules they find useful, so we have quite a bit
of those in the ports collection, more than 3200 in fact.

Another thing to keep in mind is that while a port of a module, especially
of a simple module, made without any participation of a human is likely to
work, we'd like to have a certain degree of quality assurance which is not
always limited to "the built-in tests pass, the packing list is correct".

This does not of course mean that we would not be interested in any tools
that might assist in the creation of such ports, so if you have concrete
suggestions or questions, please do share them.

Cheers,
\Anton.
-- 
There is no beauty in entropy. -- Eliezer Yudkowsky