Re: [MacPerl] Mac CPAN (was: libwww-perl-5.41 now available)

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 15.19 -0500 1998.12.22, Vicki Brown wrote:
>> Modules for MacPerl users should be distributed in a Mac format.  I
>> use .sit.hqx, so that the whole thing can just be unpacked into a
>> folder and used.  The two acceptable formats on PAUSE are gzip and
>> zip,
>
>This looked like "they don't let me send them .sit.hqx" to me...

Yes, but only if you want it to be indexed in CPAN and the index files and
put in the right places, etc.  You can put any kind of file you want on
CPAN otherwise.


>I don't see what proprietary formats have to do, directly, with posting to
>CPAN.

Because there is not one easy-to-use and free format for archiving Mac
software that is also usable on Unix.  The closest thing we have is what I
do, which still requires three different programs, and is far from painless
to deal with.

But that part, at least, can change quickly.  I will try to get
Compress::Zlib and a droplet together in the next few weeks.  Then, IMO,
the recommended practice should be to macbinarize Mac binaries, and then
tar and gzip the whole thing.  I will look into a droplet to do that part,
too, using Paul's Mac::Conversions.  So we can have one droplet to
unmacintize a file or group of files, one to create a tar.gz archive from a
directory, and one to unpack everything (unpacking .bin, not .sit.bin).

Objections or suggestions welcome.

--
Chris Nandor          mailto:pudge@pobox.com         http://pudge.net/
%PGPKey = ('B76E72AD', [1024, '0824090B CE73CA10  1FF77F13 8180B6B6'])