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…

I'm interested in getting Convert::Binary::C into a properly maintained state once again. It has a pod test that is failing (which should be an author or release test) and a regex deprecation warning in 5.22 that will likely render it uninstallable without patching in a future version of Perl. It's a really great module, and doesn't need a lot of changes just a few simple fixes. I've attempted to contact the author via rt, email and twitter. I'd be happy to adopt the module and resolve non-contentious bugs this module has…

Last week I promised (or threatened depending on your outlook) to talk about Alien::Base in the context of system integration and distribution packagers.

Philosophy:

The philosophy for Alien::Base has always been that the system library should be used when it is available, and if not, the source code for that library can be downloaded and installed for you. My own Alien::FFI (isa ="https://metacpan.org/pod/Al…

This week we rolled out the latest version of Alien::Base which includes a new feature and a bug fix. The most important change in this version are the two new avenues of communication that we have adopted, so I will discuss that first.

The first is that we have established the #native channel on irc.perl.org to discuss interactions with native interfaces. This includes Alien in general, ="https://metacpan…