[MacPerl] [RESEND TWO] CPAN, CPAN.pm, .tar.gz, etc.

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

(I had "ad nauseum" in the subject, I think the spam filters caught it.)

OK, what I am up to.

1.  I am finishing up utilities for module porters/developers and module
users for creating and unpacking .tar.gz archives.  They require
Compress::Zlib (a shared library, only works with PPC and CFM68K MacPerls),
Archive::Tar, and Mac::Conversions (on Paul Schinder's site).  Binary files
are converted to macbinary by the creation utility, and unpacked by the
unpacking utility.  Newlines are converted by both utilities.  So you have
an easy, free, way to unpack any tar.gz archive.

*CAVEAT* I will likely make a special util or flag that does no translation
on unpacking, in case the unpack program guesses wrong.  It could think a
file is text when it is not, for instance, and mangle it.


2.  I am finishing up a port of CPAN.pm.  I have it mostly working with my
Mac.  It uses the same unpacking mechanism as above.


3.  I am still working on changes to ExtUtils::MM_MacOS, which is used in
the build/install process by MacPerl and ExtUtils::MakeMaker.


4.  I am working with CPAN people to find a way to put these things on CPAN
and have them integrated with the CPAN mechanisms.  Right now, it looks
like we will have a special namespace, similar to Bundle::, which will be
fore binary distributions.  So you would not get:

  DBI-1.05-bin-1-MacOS.tar.gz

You would get something like:

  Binary-DBI-1.05-MacOS-1.tar.gz

And in MacPerl, you could run this script:

  #!perl -wMCPAN
  shell

And type:

  cpan> install Binary::DBI

That's the plan being discussed, anyway.


So, now, any comments, suggestions, concerns?

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

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