[Wylug-help] .deb equivs

[Smylers]

Aaron Crane writes:

> Smylers writes:
> 
> > I was trying to install CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb, so as to be able to
> > build .deb packages of Cpan modules.  Since CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb is
> > itself a Cpan module, I was hoping that a pre-packaged version of
> > that module would solve the obvious bootstrap issue.
> 
> Fortunately, that bootstrapping issue is easy to solve -- look into
> dh-make-perl.  It's also possible that dh-make-perl will meet all your
> needs, so that you can avoid CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb entirely.
> 
> CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb has never seemed reliable to me ...

Hmmm, I'd previously found dh-make-perl unsatisfactory or tedious or
something and it was only on discovery of cpan2dist that I started
creating .debs for Cpan packages.  So far it's always appeared to work
for me.

> ... even before I knew that debian.pkgs.cpan.org didn't have packages
> that could be expected to work on recent Debian and Ubuntu systems.

That nobody has bothered to a site that uses the software is independent
of the software itself.

> My particular concerns with it are the lack of non-Perl dependencies
> and build-dependencies

Note I said "appeared" to work above -- it's entirely possible that I've
been generating .debs which have undeclared dependencies that have
already been installed on the computers I've used them on.

> and the impossibility of automatically generating .deb package
> versions from CPAN distribution version numbers in the general case.

That's definitely something I've never cared about.

Of course the bootstrapping problem I claimed in my previous mail is
really a non-issue: simply install CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb as me under my
home directory rather than system-wide as root.  Then it can be used to
build a .deb of itself, without polluting the global install.

Stupidly I forgot about the above possibility until after I'd already
installed it system-wide.  (And then having used it to build a .deb of a
particular Cpan module for a program I was writing, I decided the whole
thing was better implemented as a Bash function so abandoned the Perl
version and stopped using the Cpan module anyway.)

Thanks for your help.

Smylers