question about porting CPAN Modules -> FreeBSD Ports

[B. Estrade]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 04:20:35PM +0100, Anton Berezin wrote:
> 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".

Right, I agree.

> 
> 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.

Thank you for the information! My main motivation for asking was that
there is currently a discussion on the perl6 list about 6PAN. And I
just didn't want FreeBSD to be underrepresented :).  Thanks again.

Brett

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

-- 
B. Estrade
Louisiana Optical Network Initiative
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