[Buildroot] [pkg-perl infra 08/12] manual: adding packages perl

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Dear Fran?ois Perrad,

On Thu, 21 Nov 2013 09:47:06 +0100, Fran?ois Perrad wrote:

> > I think this principle is quite problematic. If one looks at the
> > "libmoose-perl: new package", it has a huge number of dependencies, and
> > the vast majority of them are not available in Buildroot. One need to
> > run the scancpan script to get all the packages generated.
> >
> > I unfortunately don't really have a good proposal to offer. Isn't it
> > better to simply integrate all those Perl modules as normal Buildroot
> > packages, and have the proper tools/scripts to update those Perl module
> > packages from CPAN ? So it would be a bit like your scancpan script,
> > except that packages are committed in the Buildroot Git repository, and
> > with scancpan you can update those packages from CPAN and send patches
> > to Buildroot to push those updates.

> 
> A BR user (a single developer or an organization) needs its own
> repository for config, specific packages and final application.
> At this time, I think that packages generated by `scancpan` must be
> saved in an user repo and not in the BR repo.

That would be ok if that would work for *all* packages. But apparently
for some packages, you anyway need them in the BR repository because
the scancpan cannot generate the package .mk completely (if I
understand correctly, when the package has dependencies on C/native
libraries). And I'd find it really strange/weird to have packages in
Buildroot that declare some dependencies that are not available in
Buildroot.

Having hundreds of Perl packages does not really scare me much actually,
for several reasons:

 (1) It seems like with a tool similar to scancpan, one can easily
     maintain/updated these packages.

 (2) You're active on maintaining the Perl stuff.

 (3) With the perl infrastructure you've done, each .mk file is really
     small and straightforward.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com