App-CPANtoRPM
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This script will try to function under many different situations, and it
will often try multiple methods to accomplish a task, and many of those
methods will be available on any common linux configuration. As such, a
rigorous list of system requirements is overly complicated and won't be
listed here. In the event that the script fails, it will list the
methods tried and you can make sure that one of them will function on
your host.
The most common requirements will be listed here. In all probability, if
you meet these requirements, this script will run.
Since the most common way to obtain a module will be from CPAN, you will
need one of the following modules installed and correctly configured:
CPAN
CPANPLUS
To make sure it's configured, make sure you can run cpan or cpanp at the
command line and have it work.
If you will be applying patches to a package, you will need the patch
command.
You also need to be able to read both YAML and JSON files included in
almost every module. This means that you will need one JSON module
installed out of the following:
JSON
JSON::XS
JSON::PP
JSON::DWIW
and one YAML module from the following:
YAML
YAML::Syck
YAML::XS
YAML::Tiny
You will also need to be able to examine POD files using one of the
following modules:
Pod::Select
Pod::Simple::TextContent
You'll should have:
Module::Build
Module::Build::Tiny
ExtUtils::MakeMaker
installed in order to build modules that use the Build.PL and
Makefile.PL scripts (both Module::Build and Module::Build::Tiny are
supported).
In order to build the rpm, you need the rpmbuild program.
This script also relies on the strace program. This is necessary because
many Makefile.PL and Build.PL scripts are interactive so when you run
them, they hang waiting for input. Unfortunately, I was not able to find
any pure perl way to run a program as a child (or in a thread) and
monitor it to see if it's still running because it's doing work, or
still running because it's waiting on user input. Though somewhat crude,
strace can be used to determine that.
In order to sign packages, you must have the gpg program installed, and
you must have a key set up to sign with. In order to do this
non-interactively, you also need either the Expect module or the expect
program installed.
In order to install the package, you either must be running as root, or
have the sudo program. The sudo command may be interactive, depending on
how you have it set up.
In order to install RPMs in a yum repository, the repository must exist.
HISTORY
This script is based loosely on Erick Calder's cpan2rpm script and
Steven Pritchard's cpanspec script. Initially, I set out to modify one
or the other of them, but I found that the modifications that I felt
necessary were extensive enough that I decided a fresh implementation
was both faster and cleaner.
cpan2rpm
cpan2rpm had basically the full functionality that I wanted. It
would download a module, write a spec file for it, create an RPM,
and then install it. The only functionality that was missing was
some simple functionality to add it to a local yum repository. That
would have been very simple to add. However, it suffered from
several other significant problems.
cpan2rpm is old. It has not been supported since 2003. It has
virtually no support for modules built using Build.PL scripts, and
adding it would have been quite complicated.
cpan2rpm is also not written as cleanly, or in a style that I'd like
to maintain, so it would take a bit of cleaning up to turn it into
something I'd want to maintain.
The main problem though is how it gets information from the
Makefile.PL script. In order to get all of the information necessary
to create a SPEC file, there's a lot of information about the module
that needs to be examined. Much of that information is stored in the
various META files in any new module distribution. None of that is
used in cpan2rpm (which predates most of them), so that would have
to be added. However, even with the META files, some information
comes from the Makefile.PL (or Build.PL script) such as the default
install location.
Since the data is in a script, cpan2rpm tries to be intelligent
about extracting the information. It loads in the Makefile.PL
script, modifies it (by turning 'exit' into 'return') and evals it.
The theory is that by eval'ing it, you end up with the appropriate
data structure that you can examine.
The modifications that it makes are completely unjustified though.
It makes drastic assumptions about what the Makefile.PL file looks
like, and I can think of any number of cases where turning 'exit'
into 'return' won't produce the result you want.
As such, cpan2rpm's handling of the Makefile.PL file needed to be
( run in 2.432 seconds using v1.01-cache-2.11-cpan-437f7b0c052 )