[Bioperl-l] No more Makefile.PL (MakeMaker -> Module::Build)

[Nathan S. Haigh]

Sendu Bala wrote:
> Chris Fields wrote:
>> I see that there is a PPMMaker module with Module::Build, so we'll
>> have to
>> look into that for WinXP PPMs..  
>
> Nathan, does:
>
> perl Build.PL
> ./Build ppmdist
>
> create anything useful? For me it generates a tar.gz containing blib,
> and a ppd file (the contents of which can be adjusted by supplying "an
> optional argument codebase which is used in the generated ppd file to
> specify the (usually relative) URL of the distribution. By default,
> this value is the distribution name without any path information", eg.
> ./Build ppmdist --codebase "MSWin32-x86-multi-thread/Bioperl....tar.gz").
>
> Is this PPM4 format? What else needs to be done to it to make it
> suitable? I can easily extend the ppmdist action to do whatever you
> want, so let me know.

Sorry, but i've been busy this last week etc so haven't be able to test
RC3 on WinXP yet - hopefully Chris' tests have been sufficient.

Essentially a PPM dist comprises of the .tar.gz file you described (of
the blib dir) and then the XML file (.ppd) which describes the package
and it's dependencies. The syntax of the XML has changed for PPM4 (which
required me to do these changes by hand on the ppd that was previously
output by "make ppd". For PPM4 the XML in the ppd file can be copied
over to packages.xml file in our PPM repository. the codebase URL can be
relative/absolute and it's exact value depends on the relative position
of the XML (whether in the .ppd or package.xml file) and the .tar.gz
file. Thus, by default, they would have to reside in the same dir on our
server.

Without looking at the XML I couldn't say if it was PPM3 or PPM4
compatible. Could you e-mail me the ppd file and I'll take a look.

Cheers
Nath