Perl Hacks

Chapter 7. Developer Tricks

Hacks 60-69

Surviving software development and enjoying it are two very different things. Do you know what your code is doing? Can you look at any piece and know where it belongs and what it means? Do you trust your code? Do you trust your coworkers? What can you do to take back control of your projects, code-wise?

Obviously reducing the friction of writing code will make your life easier, but what about the friction of designing and maintaining code? Comprehensive testing and collective code standards help. Here are a few ideas to bring up in your next developer meeting that will make you a hero.

Hack #60. Rebuild Your Distributions

Rebuild your distributions with ease.

If you work with Perl modules built in the standard CPAN format (and you should, as the many available tools make your life easier this way), you generally will have a Makefile.PL or Build.PL file, lib/ and t/ directories, manifests, and so on. If the module uses ExtUtils::MakeMaker, you change your tests, update the module and rebuild the distribution again with a command such as:

$ make realclean && perl Makefile.PL && make && make test
         

Modules that use Module::Build require instead:

$ ./Build realclean && perl Build.PL && perl ./Build && perl ./Build test
         

It gets annoying typing this over and over again. Worse, if you do this for patches you send to others, you might forget and assume you have a Makefile when using Module::Build or a Build file when using ExtUtils::MakeMaker. This ...