I’ve just written a Perl module which I’m happy to contribute back to the community, e.g., in community.general, if people think it would be useful to others and appropriate to include there, but I’m not sure whether it is. I wanted to run it past the folks here and get others’ opinions, since I know there is a cost to shipping any new code in a project so the benefit has to outweigh the cost.
The problem I was trying to solve is this: I have a bunch of Perl scripts that use a bunch of Perl modules, some of which are available as OS package and some of which aren’t and need to be installed directly from CPAN. I strongly prefer to use the OS packages whenever possible, since these are maintained by someone else and updated as needed. In other words, I only want to install Perl modules from CPAN if they aren’t available in the OS.
The Perl module I wrote doesn’t actually install modules. Instead, it searches for them in dnf, yum, apt, and/or cpanm depending on what’s available on the target system and what search options the user specifies, and returns state indicating requirements / packages that can be installed with each package manager, along with a list of modules that couldn’t be found in any of the enabled sources.
The other clever thing about this module is that it expands dependencies with cpanm and then circles back and checks the OS package managers for those dependencies. In other words, if for example one of the Perl modules you search for is only available in cpanm, and that module has ten dependencies, and five of those dependencies are available from the OS and the other five are only available from cpanm, then the result returned by the module will tell you to install the five packages from the OS and six from cpanm rather than saying to install all 11 from cpanm.
Does this sound sufficiently useful to people to consider adding it to a community collection? Is there a more “Ansible way” to implement this than I have?
For reference I’ve posted my current version of the code in a gist.
Thanks,
Jonathan Kamens