[Bioperl-l] regarding DB_File and Data::Stag

[Francisco J. Ossandón]

Hello all,

I’m in the middle of polishing BioPerl to work better with ActivePerl, and a
few of the commits have focused on adding DB_File and Data::Stag  as
“required_module” to the tests files that depend on them, so they are
skipped instead of crashing.

 

So I would like to ask if it would be fine to move DB_File (used in
databases-tests) and Data::Stag (used on swiss format-tests) from Required
to Recommended on Build.PL. My reasoning is that BioPerl have many features,
and users may never need those specific features (and if they need it they
will install them). In fact since I started using BioPerl on 2007, I never
used those dependencies until I started looking for bugs beyond my work
scope. Particularly, DB_File can be tricky to install in Windows for
ActivePerl (and I’ve just realized that it behaves differently than in
Strawberry Perl), and I don’t think it should be listed as an obligatory
installation if it’s beyond the user scope.

 

Right now all tests files are properly skipped or pass for a clean
ActivePerl installation (no extra modules installed besides MingGW and
Test::Most), so my next step is to check tests after I install all the
recommended extra modules.

 

Cheers,

 

Francisco J. Ossandon