CPAN::DistroBuilder - Create a distro from a bundle or a number of modules from CPAN

  % perl -MCPAN::DistroBuilder -webuild ApacheSDK 0.1 Bundle::Apache

  % perl -MCPAN::DistroBuilder -webuild CoolSDK 0.1 MD5 CGI

This package does a very simple thing. It fetches the source packages from CPAN, using CPAN.pm and puts them all into a single tar.gz package ready for distribution. This distribution package later can be installed in one command and therefore very useful for users who have to use our software, but know little or no Perl at all and don't know how to use CPAN shell to fetch and install all the required packages. Releasing Bundles and properly defining prerequisites in the CPAN modules is very important, and we go one step further to actually provide sort of SDK.

This package relies on the locally working CPAN.pm's shell. If you didn't configure your CPAN.pm, do it before using this package. If normally CPAN.pm works for you, this package should work too.

Some packages' build is interactive (i.e. user input is expected). Therefore we use CPAN.pm's inactivity_timeout attribute to interrupt the awaiting for user's input after a few seconds, which works in perl Makefile.PL stage, but not during make. In the latter case you have to manually satisfy the requested input or interrupt it. Since here we completely rely on CPAN.pm's shell to do the right thing, there is not much we can do. Remember that we have to run perl Makefile.PL to extract the prerequisites. You can adjust the value of the inactivity_timeout attribute in CPAN::DistroBuilderConfig.

Unfortunately some packages define they own interactive methods which CPAN cannot skip automatically, in this case you have to manually answer the question.

To package the packages or bundles Foo and Bar into a ready for distribution package FooBar-0.2, execute:

  % perl -MCPAN::DistroBuilder -webuild FooBar 0.2 Foo Bar

this will create FooBar-0.2.tar.gz in the current directory.

To install the contents of the created distribution package, run:

  % tar -xzvf FooBar-0.2.tar.gz
  % cd FooBar-0.2
  % perl Makefile.PL && make && make test && make install

The last command will go through all the source packages and run:

  % perl Makefile.PL && make && make test && make install

in every one. You may need to do the make install part as a root user if the files need to be installed system-wide.

When the packages are fetches from CPAN they are saved in the distro-build directory (or a different one if you override the build_dir attribute in CPAN::DistroBuilderConfig) created at the current directory. This directory is cleaned up automatically on the next invocation of the this tool, if invoked from the same directory.

Notice that the build process is logged to the make.out file in the current directory.

As a side-effect of using CPAN.pm is that it creates the .cpan directory in the current directory where it downloads the index files and the modules source packages.

Stas Bekman <stas@stason.org>

Inspired by Doug MacEachern <dougm@apache.org>

The CPAN::DistroBuilder module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.