Tales of a blog renamer

ActiveState is great, there's no denying that. Their ActivePerl port is top notch. Windows itself is a bit of an issue. Normally you stick with PPM and generally this will have all the packages you need.

Suppose you decide to create a module though. The biggest problem is documentation - it's all over the place. Here's the steps as I have found so far:

• Review prereqs. Read perltoot and perlmod. Hopefully you've made a few informal .pms before.
• If you plan to distribute it, get an account on pause.perl.org. Once your account is created you may want to look at your profile page, there are some interesting settings there. PS - your email address propegate all over the Internet within a day or two, so take precautions.
  
• CPAN and Pause have a lot of FAQs but none really cover the whole process of creating the mod. This is covered in perlnewmod.
• For Windows, you will want to install the following PPMs: module-starter, module-builder, test-pod, and test-pod-coverage.
• MakeMaker doesn't work on Windows without jumping through hoops. Module-builder should work out of the box.
• Be careful with dependencies. They can be specified in build.pl. After a cpan upload (and something like a week's time) your module is auto-built all over the place. ActiveState tries to make a PPD. CPANTesters has a crack at it. debian.pkgs.cpan.org tries to build it. There's probably a lot more automated builders and repackagers that I'm not covering here.

I'm pretty excited. Hopefully this module thing will play out well. There's a lot to think about and a lot of testing I need to do. Gotta get well medicated and keep diving in.