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

[Gabor Szabo]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 10:23 AM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
>
>  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?

I was using Module::Packaged of Leon (blame him :-) I patched it where I could
but that was almost a year ago. I wish to start it again.
See my most recent source if you have time to point me where to fetch
the data from.
http://svn1.hostlocal.com/szabgab/trunk/Module-Packaged-0.86/


>  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".

probably that's what the module is doing. I think both should be counted and
maybe we should also mark which module is where.


>  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 wish to count CPAN distros (that is tar.gz files from CPAN).


>  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.

There are some 13.000 on CPAN so 8000+ is still less than 2/3.


>  > 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.

Can you elaborate - give a few short examples or at least point me
where is it described?

>  - Think about the licenses you apply. Write Free software.

Do you have examples you encountered where it is not so on CPAN?

>  - Write better code. There is a lot of junk in CPAN.

Wow,  do you have a suggestion how to automatically measure this?

Gabor