CPAN Module RPMs

[Paul Howarth]

Dave Cross wrote:
> 
> I've just started to dabble with packaging RPMs from CPAN modules and 
> making them available for download (see http://rpm.mag-sol.com/). This 
> had brought up a number of questions that people on this list would 
> probably be best placed to answer.
> 
> 1/ Currently I've been using cpan2rpm to build the RPMs. Are there any 
> better tools out there? What do you use to create RPMs from CPAN 
> distributions?

Try cpanspec (it's in Extras). I don't use it myself but I know a lot of 
packages in Extras were built starting from a cpanspec package.

> 2/ Are there any good tools for building web pages from RPMs. I've 
> played with rpm2html but I don't want to my web pages to look like it's 
> still 1998. Something that interfaces with the Template Toolkit would be 
> great, and I'd be happy to write that if it doesn't already exist.

How about repoview, which is used by Fedpra Extras, e.g.:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/5/i386/repodata/

> 3/ I assume there are standards that define how CPAN modules should be 
> packaged for use with Fedora (I'm largely targeting Fedora - if the RPMs 
> work with other distributions then that's a bonus). Are they documented 
> somewhere?

Using cpanspec will give you a good starting point as I believe it's 
based on the Fedora perl package template. The packages should meet the 
general packaging guidelines 
(http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines) and some tips for 
perl packages in particular can be found at: 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Perl

Paul.