Using CPAN's Toolchain to Manage Your Code

By Tom Hukins
Date: Saturday, 5 December 2009 15:50
Duration: 20 minutes
Language:
Tags: cpan packaging releasemanagement

CPAN has a reliable, powerful set of tools that it uses to package software, produce documentation, run tests and install distributions along with their dependencies.

These tools do such a good job that it's a shame only to use them with CPAN modules.

This talk will show you how to take existing Perl scripts and rearrange them into modules that install their dependencies having passed test scripts and ship with good looking, hyperlinked documentation.

Each idea introduced in this talk takes little effort and improves your code independently of the other ideas: you can choose the parts you like and ignore the rest. Combined, these ideas make your code considerably more manageable.

Furthermore, you can treat your work as if it were on CPAN without releasing it to the wider world. You can make your new modules depend on other private modules as well modules on CPAN and have all dependencies automatically installed.