A few months ago I asked the list for some thoughts on the creation of a composite distribution for the IO-Compress-* modules. This was to fix a really nasty issue where you could download an update for, say, IO-Compress-Bzip2, but break an existing install of IO-Compress-Zlib and, in turn, Compress-Zlib, IO-Zlib and CPAN in the process. I've now (finally) found the time to actually do something about it, so it's time for me to report back. Here is what I'm going to do. The Compress-Raw-* distributions stay as they are. A new distribution called "IO-Compress" will include everything from the distributions below IO-Compress-Base IO-Compress-Bzip2 IO-Compress-Zlib Compress-Zlib Note the inclusion of IO-Compress-Bzip2. This, of course, will have an impact on the core. In particular, it means the core also has to include Compress-Raw-Bzip2 to support IO-Compress-Bzip2 if the core takes IO-Compress in its entirety. I'd prefer for the core version of IO-Compress to match the CPAN version if at all possible, but I'm open to creating a cut-down variant for the core if necessary. Regarding Bzip2, I include the C source for Bzip2 in Compress-Raw-Bzip2 and the license looks ok from a perl perspective (see http://www.bzip.org/1.0.5/bzip2-manual-1.0.5.html for the gory details). Comments please? If there aren't any objections, I'll put a patch together for the core. Once that stabilizes I'll upload to CPAN. PaulThread Next