Moving my Meta Modules
Some time ago I wrote Test-YAML-Meta. At the time the name was given as a compliment to Test-YAML-Valid, which validates YAML files in terms of the formatting, rather than the data. Test-YAML-Meta took that a step further and validated the content data for META.yml files included with CPAN distributions against the evolving CPAN META Specification.
With the release of Parse-CPAN-Meta I wrote Test-CPAN-Meta, which dropped the sometimes complex dependency of the more verbose YAML parsers, for the one that was specifically aimed at CPAN META.yml files. With the emergence of JSON, there was a move to encourage authors to release META.json files too. Although considered a subset of the full YAML specification, JSON has a much better defined structure that has more complete parser support. Coinciding with this move was the desire by David Golden to properly define a specification for the CPAN Meta files. It was agreed that v2.0 of the CPAN Meta Specification should use JSON as the default implementation. As a consequence I then released Test-JSON-Meta.
Although the initial naming structure seemed the right the thing at the time, it is becoming clearer that really the names need to be revised. As such I looking to change two of the distributions to better fit the implementations. So in the coming weeks expect to see some updates. The name changes I'm planning are:
- Test-CPAN-Meta => Test-CPAN-Meta (no change)
- Test-YAML-Meta => Test-CPAN-Meta-YAML
- Test-JSON-Meta => Test-CPAN-Meta-JSON
Underneath these current namespaces is the Version module that describes the data structures of the various specifications. In the short term these will also move, but will be replaced by a dependency on the main CPAN-Meta distribution in the future. There will be final releases for Test-YAML-Meta and Test-JSON-Meta, which will act as a wrapper distribution to re-point the respective distributions to their new identities.
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Testing for validity is now very easy with CPAN::Meta. It's just this:
CPAN::Meta->load_file($file, {lazy_validation => 0})It will throw an exception if the file is not a valid CPAN Meta file.
It works with either YAML or JSON files and for any historical version of the specification.
So Test::CPAN::Meta should just be a simple Test wrapper around that.