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Postings from June 2006
James Mastros wrote:
>
> I would love to see more dependency information on perl packages, in the
> META.yml files, on things like "I need a database, more or less any
> database", and "I need a copy of the program gtk-config in my PATH" that
> installers could make decisions based on.
>
> Sadly, it appears that there isn't space available within the
> requires-format keys, which would be ideal. (requires, build_requires,
> recommends, conflicts). I would suggest adding versions of them suffexed by
> "2", or "-2", and making the keys for the existing ones say "package:".
> Then we can add "os:", "header:", and "executable:" spaces, and make the
> rule that older installers, when faced with a space they don't know how to
> handle, should warn on all requirements in it, but otherwise ignore them (IE
> assume they are satasified for everything but "conflicts".)
That list of keys is sufficient to describe the relationships you want (*),
because you can require or recommend more things than just other Perl modules.
requires:
os(linux)
executable(gtk-config)
However older installers wouldn't cope with that either, so that's out.
> (An "installed size" field would also be lovely, but calls very much for
> computation by the thing creating the META.yml, rather then a statement by
> the developer.)
You can't compute that before installation on the host system. Even if
we rule out XS and pure perl modules that generate files during build,
once installed, the complete size taken by all the files might be larger
than the sum of the sizes of the individual files.
(*) to be pedantic, 'obsoletes' is missing from the list, though.