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

[Fields, Christopher J]

On Apr 29, 2014, at 5:22 PM, Francisco J. Ossandón <fossandonc at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Agreed.  We’re all spoiled on Linux/Mac installs :)

Saying that, we need to move beyond DB_File.  Mark did something along these lines a while back...

> 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.

The problem I have found is ActivePerl (in the past at least) would convert all recommends -> requires for a PPM (at the time their recommended installation path), so they would all end up as dependencies regardless.  Maybe this has changed?

> 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.

Sounds good!

chris

> Cheers,
> 
> 
> 
> Francisco J. Ossandon
> 
> 
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