A milestone for Alien::Base
I have been working on a set of base classes intended to make creating a new Alien:: distribution for some library as easy as making a simple Module::Build based distro. So far the code isn’t on CPAN yet, follow its progress on GitHub.
I haven’t been feeling so well today, so I have been sitting around watching movies (which I own on DVD) on TV. Of course I can’t sit still that long without doing anything so Alien::Base saw a burst of activity today.
Along with testing I am also keeping an Alien::Base-based Alien::GSL (which provides the Gnu Scientific Library) in the examples folder. The big news today is that this example distro can now query the GNU FTP server, pick the newest version of the library. It then downloads, extracts and builds the library in a temporary folder. Finally it “installs” the library in a File::ShareDir directory in the Alien::GSL root/share directory. Even this isn’t as cool as how it does this:
It does it entirely from the Build.PL configuration!
It is my hope that most small/self-contained libraries can be wrapped in this simple way. In this way I hope to increase the number of Alien:: modules available on CPAN.
Of course its still needs much more functionality, lots more tests, and all the documentation. All of that is coming however, so keep watching!
As I delve into the deeper Perl magic I like to share what I can.