cpan2dist oddity

cpanplus is great - really, i mean it. i don't like its internals, and having to adapt to it for cpanplus::dist::mdv is not my fondest memory. however, it gets the job done, and that's what counts in the end.

but cpanplus has some oddities in the user-space also. cpan2dist, which is a tool allowing you to create a native package for your platform, sometimes makes me cry.

it insists on building prereqs for the module you want. that's fine, except for one thing: it will also build packages for modules that are not up to date... and this is where the fun starts.

you can think that --nobuildprereqs would prevent this, but nope, it's the default and really means: "don't rebuild prereqs if we're at latest version, but rebuild anyway if we're not at latest version". the --buildprereqs indeed means "i really really want to loose my time, please rebuild a package for all the prereqs even if i already have them installed and working". like this option is of any use... erm.

so in app::cpan2pkg, in order not to build the prereqs, i ended up using --ignore flags (flags as in plural form, since using a negative look-ahead regex such as /(?<!$name)$/ do not work). it took me quite some time to come up with this solution, since --ban was not working at that time.

so life was good, i've used cpan2pkg quite some time to create rpms for mandriva, and updated it till v1.0.0. however, since some time, i can see strange things in the packages submitted on upstream buildsystem: the build prereqs were not set. and i had to update the spec file manually, adding all those missing prereqs. i got tired of that, and investigated what happened.

after some experiments, it appears that cpan2dist seems to have somehow changed the way it handles its --ignore flags. ignored modules now are removed from the prereqs completely, and thus the cpanplus::dist backend do not even see them any more. and thus, buildrequires end up empty. of course, --nobuildprereqs still retained its old silly behaviour...

fortunately, it seems that --ban now works correctly (at least on 2 tests that i made). so i've just updated cpan2pkg, and version 1.1.0 should be available soon on cpan, this time really adding the needed buildrequires.

till the next cpan2dist change, of course... :-|

note: i don't want to sound too harsh to jos in this post... i totally understand that cpanplus is still 0.x software - moreover, this is a bug fix in my mind, since --ban was not working.