Graham Ollis

The Alien::Base (AB) team has done a number of things over the past year with AB to make the installing packages more reliable. For AB based Alien developers who have created their own Alien::Libfoo this is great because they get the benefit of more reliable installs when users upgrade their version of AB without having to release a new version of Alien::Libfoo. Though largely backward compatible with version 0.005 (or perhaps further), modern versions of AB have also been given a few interface enhancements that require changes in Alien::Libfoo in order to benefit. So if you are an AB based Alien developer, please consider a couple of simple changes that you can make to make your distribution more reliable.

Use %c instead of %pconfigure.

Long story short, the %p directive was intended to handle the portability problem when running a command in the current directly. On Unix this requires a ./ prefix. That won’t work on Windows. Unfortunately, configure is usually a shell script and on Windows you need MSYS (or something similar) to provide sh and friends. Even if you had MSYS, %pconfigure won’t correctly invoke configure on Windows, because that isn’t how you run a shell script on Windows. So back in version 0.005 we added the %c directive to mean “run configure however that works on this platform”. If AB sees that you are using %c it will also make sure that Alien::MSYS gets added as a build requirement, if it is needed. In many cases, adding Windows support for your AB based Alien distribution may be as simple replacing %pconfigure with %c and making AB 0.005 a prerequisite.

Require Alien::Base 0.018 (or 0.021)

In version 0.016 we introduced staged installs to blib, and in 0.018 we made it the default. This was a significant change so while believed it shouldn't break any existing modules, out an abundance of caution, I blogged about this a while ago, and included some of the technical details:

• https://blogs.perl.org/users/graham_ollis/2015/04/alienbase-past-present-and-future-upcoming-change-in-behavior-1.html

So far, this change has been pretty positive. The upshot is that the cpan tester installs work in the same way as regular installs that users make. This means that the results in your cpan testers matrix is more reliable AND more representative as to how users are actually using your module. I strongly recommend that anyone using AB bump the required version up to 0.018. If your package doesn’t use pkg-config consider requiring 0.021 which fixed a bug with system libraries that don’t have a pkg-config .pc file.