We consider to use Minilla or Dist::Milla for our perl development. Declaring dependencies is done via cpanfile. I expected to find an exact definintion of what and how can be declared. But
perldoc cpanfile : Shows only the principal usage. 'SEE ALSO' section does not help.
perldoc Module::CPANfile: same as cpanfile.
perldoc cpanfile-faq: no explanation of the exact syntax or a link to it, only
Familiar DSL syntax
This is a new file type, but the format and syntax isn't entirely new. The metadata it can declare is exactly a subset of "Prereqs" in CPAN Meta Spec.
The syntax borrows a lot from Module::Install. Module::Install is a great way to easily declare module metadata such as name, author and dependencies. cpanfile format is simply to extract the dependencies into a separate file, which means most of the developers are familiar with the syntax.
Does anybody know where to find an exact description of the cpanfile syntax/format ?
I installed Module::CPANFile
and perldoc cpanfile
and perldoc cpanfile-faq
were available.
The POD for cpanfile
states:
[the] cpanfile specification (this document) is based on Ruby's
Gemfile http://gembundler.com/man/gemfile.5.html specification.
The link in the cpanfile
manual page is broken. It should point to: http://bundler.io/v1.3/man/gemfile.5.html
cpanfile
is designed to "backwards compatible" with Module::Install
DSL syntax and is "convertible to CPAN::Meta::Prereqs" and inspired by CPAN::Meta Spec v.2
etc.
As I understand it cpanfile
is somewhat of a "meta-format" and fits into a range of TIMTOWTDI approaches (see miyagawa's blog describing cpanfile
), compatible with Module::Install
and mostly self-documenting. For example if you run mymeta-cpanfile
inside a directory with META
files it will build a cpanfile
for you; you can write a script that describes prerequisites from CPAN::Meta::Prereqs
and then $file->save('cpanfile');
to write a cpanfile
.
As for Dist::Milla
, in the tutorial (see the POD
included with Dist::Milla
) miyagawa points out that
"If you decide to manually construct [a] new cpanfile
, the format is mostly compatible to Module::Install
's requirement DSL". The tutorial also gives a short example.
I think it would be fair to ask miyagawa to clarify the status and use cases of the cpanfile
specification/format in the documentation for the distribution. That and a few more examples would answer questions like yours. He has mostly done the work on this already - it is just not all in one place.
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