Fixing A Hole

Fixing a Hole

Recently xenoterracide mentioned an issue he had with Dist::Zilla which he solved in a clever way¹. I had been thinking about this problem for a while myself. RJBS generates solid code, and nobody agree’s 100% on everything I respect him enough to give serious thought to his solutions to problems. So it was surprising to me that I had been looking at Dist::Zilla for a while and found something about it unnerving that I couldn’t put my finger upon. Then shortly before xenoterracide’s blog post I came to the same realization he had.

Dist::Zilla is designed to help the author develop faster, but it (inadvertently I'm sure) disenfranchises people who might contribute a patch by raising the bar for contribution. There are extra hoops you have to jump through to contribute. More modules from CPAN you need before you can work on the modules from CPAN you need.

We have this problem with Moose, even though it uses Module::Install. To hack on Moose you need roughly ten extra modules installed that aren’t required to run Moose. That is assuming you want to properly test the results. I ran into this tonight when I was setting up a smoker for Moose. My smoker couldn’t just checkout the git repo and start smoking it needed at the very least Module::Install and Module::Install::AuthorRequires.

The solution I found was to simply embrace the problem. Task::SDK::Moose is on it’s way to CPAN. This is a module that will install all of the modules you need to hack on Moose or Class::MOP straight from the repository. To paraphrase Homer Simpson.

Here’s to CPAN: the cause of and solution to all of Perl’s problems.

I’d like to thank doy for vetting the modules I included and making sure Class::MOP was covered.

Update 2010-05-14

Talking with RJBS on IRC today, it was a carefully considered decision.

[A]ll of my dists can be tested with “prove -lr t” and I accept patches against the cpan tarball. [B]ut in the end, I decided that 99.9% of my code was written by me, and contributions were few and far between; making things much easier for me and somewhat harder for everyone else benefitted me

In no way did I wish to express that RJBS was being sloppy. He is an excellent developer, and I use more than a few of his modules every day. Dist::Zilla is part of Task::Kensho because I think it makes creating a distribution simpler; something we want more people to do.

One of the problems I have seen contributing to cpanminus is that there is generated code in the repository, making it unclear which files I should patch.

Written on May 12th, 2010 by Chris Prather