Creating Debian dependencies while using CPAN?

[Christian Hammers <ch@westend.com>]

Hello

I'm (as probably all of you) still unsatisfied with having every Perl 
module as Debian package available to fulfill the dependency problem.
(I know as module maintainer how easy perl debs are to make but
we just can't build them as fast as they appear!)


Would there be a way if we modify the CPAN command line tool in such
a way that it generates a control file automagically when getting
a new module or taking a control file from a set of Debian created
files (with manually edited dependencies) and decides upon this if it
will install this module or not - CPAN modules are pretty unified 
named and versioned so that would not be a problem.

I.e. if I say "install Net::NiceProtocol" our modified CPAN creates an
entry in the available/status file saying
	Package: libnet-niceprotocol-perl
	Dependencies: perl-5.005, ${dh_perldep_output}
	Description: CPAN installed module Net::NiceProtocol
then it would scan this blib directory and from this create a 
/var/lib/dpkg/info/libnet-niceprotocol-perl.files, an assumation
on dependencies based on "use" and "require" lines and maybe some
postinst/preinst scripts and run them.

dpkg could be enhanced in such a way that when it sees a package name 
with a double colon it starts the cpan interface.
APT could even have a method-cpan module.

Of couse, at least for backward compatibility an entry in our available
file would always get precendence for a CPAN provided module so that we
can handle difficult/special modules ourselves. (I.e. a module that 
has both, recommended and hard dependencies or need special postinst/preinst)

Any thoughs?

bye,

 -christian-

-- 
	   Real programmers don't comment their code.  
     It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
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