My experiences maintaining Socket.pm lead me to believe that any CPAN dist that gets shipped with core perl has an odd hybrid of a build system attached to it, that is quite unlike what process it would go through were the CPAN client(s) to install it instead. Specifically, things like ExtUtils::CBuilder can't be used, which defeats all of the "configure"-like testing in Socket's Makefile.PL. To help this I would like to propose a new way to bundle CPAN modules that come as part of the core perl distribution, but which core perl itself doesn't depend on (i.e. the ones, such as Socket, that are only shipped to provide a useful end-user utility). The way this would work is that some new directory (lets for now call it morelibs/) would be created at toplevel, containing either plain CPAN tarballs or unpacked sources (I haven't quite decided yet). These sources would all be built, tested and installed -after- core perl itself, using the newly-built real cpan client, thus ensuring the process "feels" exactly the same to the installed distributions. This should make it much easier for distributions like Socket to be maintained, as I'd no longer have to be afraid every time I want to add a new configure-time test. It may also lead the way to being able to make simpler core distributions, or custom distributions of core perl (e.g. Linux distributors wanting to drop more in there before building). Any thoughts? -- Paul "LeoNerd" Evans leonerd@leonerd.org.uk ICQ# 4135350 | Registered Linux# 179460 http://www.leonerd.org.uk/Thread Next