Re: Perl modules

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> skribis:

> it looks like I have stumbled upon an enormous dependency tree:
>
> For kdelibs, I would like soprano;
> for soprano, I would like redland;
> for redland, I need rasqal;
> for some tests of rasqal to work, I need perl-xml-dom;
> for perl-xml-dom, I need libwww-perl;
> for libwww-perl, I need a lot of packages:

Ouch.  :-)

> This leads me to the question: How should the packages containing perl
> modules be named, and in which files should they be defined?
>
> So far, there are the following packages in xml.scm:
> perl-xml-parser containing XML-Parser
> perl-xml-parser-perlsax containing libxml-perl
> perl-xml-simple containing XML-Simple
>
> The second one is definitely a misnomer; I was looking for
> XML::Parser::PerlSAX, and a search led me to the documentation page
>   http://search.cpan.org/~kmacleod/libxml-perl-0.08/lib/XML/Parser/PerlSAX.pm
> which is just one of the modules of libxml-perl
>   http://search.cpan.org/~kmacleod/libxml-perl-0.08/
>
> If we follow our standard naming scheme, then the packages should be called
> xml-parser, libxml-perl and xml-simple. Notice that two of them do not
> contain the word "perl". Should we add "perl" in front then, similarly to
> what we do with python modules? How about libxml-perl? Do we keep it as such,
> or should we then call it perl-libxml-perl for consistency?

I would add the ‘perl-’ prefix, unless the package stands alone (for
instance, Hydra would be called ‘hydra’, not ‘perl-hydra’.)

For the rest of the name, I would take the Perl module name.  So
‘XML::Parser’ leads to ‘perl-xml-parser’, etc.

In cases where there’s not a single module tree root, I would stick to
the upstream name, removing any redundant ‘perl’ in the name.  So
‘libxml-perl’ (which provides modules under XML::, Data::Grove, etc.)
would lead to ‘perl-libxml’.

How does that sound?

> Concerning the files, maybe all perl modules should go into perl.scm?

I don’t think so.  For instance, I think it’s OK to have perl-xml-* in
xml.scm, esp. because they are also used by ‘intltool’ for instance.
I’d use perl.scm for any Perl-specific library that doesn’t have a
better home (yeah, that’s very informal...)

WDYT?

Ludo’.