Packaging CPAN modules for Fedora, the Oslo QA Hackathon, CPAN::Porters

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2008-03-07 at 09:37 +0200, Gabor Szabo wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I see on http://perl-qa.hexten.net/wiki/index.php/OsloQAWorkshop2008
> that probably non of you is going to participate. That's a pity.
> Anyway I am trying to setup some documentation/system that might help
> all the distros to include more CPAN packages more easily.
> 
> For this I setup a page collecting information about the availability of CPAN
> packages in the various distros http://www.szabgab.com/distributions/
> As you can see Fedora is way underrepresented there.
How did you collect these numbers?

Fedora FC2: 44?

Apart from that this particular distro is dead for many years, the
figure is _way off_ from current status.

My current estimate of CPAN dists in current Fedora is:
# grep perl- owners.fedora.list | wc -l
841

That's in the same range as Ubuntu, Debian and other major Linux
distros.


I guess you counted the number of CPAN dists in FC2's "Fedora Core", not
the number of perl-dists in "Fedora Core 2" + "Fedora Extra 2". 


Also, I don't know what you count as "module". Perl in Fedora without
any doubt has evolved sufficiently long to justify boldly claiming 
"most essential vital modules/dists to be in Fedora" and only "rarely
needed modules" (minus those with legal issues) to be missing.

I really have no idea how a distro can be claimed to be supporting 8000+
perl-dists, nor how useful such a distro would be. My wild guess is they
are counting differently or contain a lot of duplicated CPAN modules.


> What if you could have a "wishlist" that you could present to CPAN module
> authors? What would that contain? What would make life easier for those
> who package CPAN modules for Fedora?
In decreasing priority:

- Improve your versioning scheme - perl's versioning doesn't harmonize
well with rpm's versioning.
- Think about the licenses you apply. Write Free software.
- Write better code. There is a lot of junk in CPAN.
...

Ralf