Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Starting Your Distribution

Since the start of CPAN long ago, best practices and standard conventions in using CPAN have settled, so now pretty much everyone agrees on what a good distribution needs to have. You don’t have to start from scratch if you use tools to create the distribution skeleton for you.

h2xs

The canonical distribution creation tool isn’t really a distribution-creation tool. By its name, it’s designed to convert C header files into XS files, the glue language that connects Perl to C. It’s grown since then, even to the point that most people use it without its main feature:

% h2xs –XAn Some::Module
Defaulting to backward compatibility with perl 5.14.2

Writing Some–Module/lib/Some/Module.pm
Writing Some–Module/Makefile.PL
Writing Some–Module/README
Writing Some–Module/t/Some–Module.t
Writing Some–Module/Changes
Writing Some–Module/MANIFEST

Distribution::Cooker

Distribution::Cooker module is the least sophisticated of the distribution-creation tools, designed for the people who don’t need much.^[188] It cooks a directory of templates, meaning you can design your distribution any way you like and then replicate it. Once you get things the way you like, you don’t need to modify the other tools’ output each time. Indeed, the best way to use this tool is to start with another tool, modify the output until you like what you have, then design a corresponding template.

Module::Starter

Module::Starter is the best tool for people who don’t know what they want yet. You start with a ...