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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
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Tuesday September 28, 2004
04:08 AM
Ovid
(No, this isn't a post about Curtis.)
I just noticed the existence of Ovid, a collection of scripts for recursively converting perl CPAN modules into RPM files, at it advertises itself. This is of interest for people who, like me, maintain a large number of RPMs of Perl modules for a Linux distribution. Has anyone looked at it ? I browsed through the code quite fast, but I've at least two concerns: autocomputation of dependencies (rpmbuild already knows how to find perl dependencies of perl modules, altough not in the most perfect way, but Ovid reimplements this), and customization of the specfile template (need to make it a bit more customizable.)
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Re: Ovid (Score:2)
As a user of an rpm-based distribution, it's annoying when there are a relatively small number of CPAN rpms available (and they are generally of older versions of modules).
Do you have any feeling
Re: Ovid (Score:2)
I looked at creating a module CPANPLUS::Dest::MDK to generate MDK-compliant RPMs while installing. I hadn't much time, but the first problems I've found while coding this were the limitations of rpmbuild itself. But CPANPLUS already solves the problem of fetching all dependencies from the CPAN.
From the OS packager point of view, the problems are to generate RPMs compliant with the distribution guidelines (e.g. they go in vendor_perl),
Re: Ovid (Score:2)
It depends which repositories you point yum at. I have just over 100 rpms installed with names including the string 'perl'. And there only seem to be about half a dozen more at the repositories that I use.
Ovid Poe (Score:2)
That was a bit weird. It's relatively new, too. I wonder if I'll start getting email asking for help with this the way I did with POE [cpan.org]. (One time Tim Bunce stopped me at a conference to tell me how much he enjoyed using my modules. I was mometarily flattered until I realized he was talking about POE.)
Still, it looks cool. I wonder how well it works?
Re:Ovid Poe (Score:2)
dh-make-perl for Debian (Score:2)
If you're packaging for debian instead, dh-make-perl is a good package to install. Don't look at the source though, or you'll go blind.
Oh, and make sure that you install and set up apt-file first, otherwise it misses the dependencies.
-Dom