Developers of Sympa

[Luc Didry <address@concealed>]

samedi 26 mai 2018, 10:55:43 CEST Marc Chantreux wrote:
> i realize i wasn't clear on this:
> 
> i'm sure that people who are used to perl toolchain will prefer it over
> the system packages and we are developpers... we all love plackup :)
> 
> but to me, unix distro packagers are persons we really should care a lot
> because distro packaging is the best way to enlist new users and get lot
> of feedback so i really would like us to ease there job.
> 
> the way i see it (but i'm not good at packaging), as long as there is
> a Task::Sympa on cpan, some can
> 
>     dh-make-perl --build --cpan Task::Sympa
> 
> to have a good start. i don't know if this tooling exists with carton.
> Also using aptitude install libtask-sympa-perl instead of carton should
> could be a good way to spot and report bugs to distro packagers.
> 
> i really like the way the Task::Kensho is maintained and shipped both on
> cpan and debian and that was the way i wanted to do things but i failed
> to open this topic with the other members of the list.
> 
> regards,
> marc
> 
> 

I discussed about it with Racke during the hackathon.

First: it doesn't seems that you can do dh-make-perl magic things with
a cpanfile.
Second: Racke doesn't rely on Task::Sympa to build the Debian package,
he prefers to handle the dependencies himself. We don't know about rpm
or aur (ArchLinux) packagers. But we don't know if they have tools
like dh-make-perl either (maybe rpm does, but I'm confident aur does
not).

For the comparison to Task:Kensho, I don't think it applies to Sympa:
Task::Kensho is about providing sets of modules to write better Perl,
or quickly setting up a dev environnement, not installing an
application.

For installing applications, cpanfile provides an easy way to install
required deps and chosen features. Your current Task::Sympa does not
provides this granularity (that could be achieved by providing
Task::Sympa::Core, Task::Sympa::Recommends, Task::Sympa::Feature::LDAP
and so on). More problematic, current Task::Sympa turns all optional
deps as requirements (who would want to install DBD::Sybase or
DBD::Oracle if he does not use those databases?).

I digged a little and found that Minilla can create META.json from a
cpanfile. So it would be easy to maintain Task::Sympa from cpanfile
(but you still have to maintain feature deps as separate modules,
META.json does not handle features).
-- 
Luc
"La route est longue, mais la voie est libre…" https://framasoft.org

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