Re: using automake to generate perl modules and Makefile.PL?

[Russ Allbery]

Harlan Stenn <address@hidden> writes:

> Anybody have a framework for using automake (and perhaps autoconf) to
> generate a Makefile.PL for a perl module?

The main packages that I've seen do this are ImageMagick and rrdtool.
I'll note, though, as someone who does a lot of software installations, it
doesn't work very well for the installation bit, particularly if one has
special requirements for installing Perl modules.  For example, for our
site, we have some special tools to build Perl modules that pass a dozen
parameters to Makefile.PL to help support a Perl with a fairly complicated
module tree (we support multiple module trees, one of which is site-wide
and one of which is local, and use AFS @sys values for the systems tree
rather than the Perl defaults).  autoconf and automake taking control of
the Perl module installation tends to make it very hard to do that.

I recommend at least adding an option that generates the Makefile.PL
sufficiently to build the Perl module but doesn't do anything with it on
make install, so that the installer can configure the package and then
apply their normal Perl configure, build, and install commands to the
module subdirectory.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>