Just a Theory

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been working on a subclass of Module::Build that supports testing with Apache::Test. Today, Geoff announced the release of Apache::Test 1.12. This release includes the new Module::Build subclass, Apache::TestMB. Now anyone using Apache::Test to test their module can convert the build system to Module::Build.

To set an example, I’ve just released MasonX::Interp::WithCallbacks using the new build module. The conversion was simple; in fact, I think that Apache::TestMBis easier to use than Apache::TestMM (which integrates Apache::Test with ExtUtils::MakeMaker). My Makefile.PL had looked like this:

#!perl -w

use strict;
use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;
use File::Spec::Functions qw(catfile catdir);
use constant HAS_APACHE_TEST => eval {require Apache::Test};

# Set up the test suite.
if (HAS_APACHE_TEST) {
    require Apache::TestMM;
    require Apache::TestRunPerl;
    Apache::TestMM->import(qw(test clean));
    Apache::TestMM::filter_args();
    Apache::TestRunPerl->generate_script();
} else {
    print "Skipping Apache test setup.\n";
}

my $clean = join ‘ ‘, map { catfile(’t’, $_) }
  qw(mason TEST logs);

WriteMakefile(
    NAME		=> ‘MasonX::Interp::WithCallbacks’,
    VERSION_FROM	=> ‘lib/MasonX/Interp/WithCallbacks.pm’,
    PREREQ_PM		=> { ‘HTML::Mason’             => ‘1.23’,
                                ‘Test::Simple’            => ‘0.17’,
                                ‘Class::Container’        => ‘0.09’,
                                ‘Params::CallbackRequest’ => ‘1.11’,
                              },
    clean               => { FILES => $clean },
    ($] >= 5.005 ?    ## Add these new keywords supported since 5.005
      (ABSTRACT_FROM    => ‘lib/MasonX/Interp/WithCallbacks.pm’,
       AUTHOR           => ‘David Wheeler <david@kineticode.com>’) : ()),
);

The new Build.PL simplifies things quite a bit. It looks like this:

use Module::Build;

my $build_pkg = eval { require Apache::TestMB }
  ? ‘Apache::TestMB’ : ‘Module::Build’;

$build_pkg->new(
    module_name        => ‘MasonX::Interp::WithCallbacks’,
    license            => ‘perl’,
    requires           => { ‘HTML::Mason’             => ‘1.23’,
                               ‘Test::Simple’            => ‘0.17’,
                               ‘Class::Container’        => ‘0.09’,
                               ‘Params::CallbackRequest’ => ‘1.11’
                             },
    build_requires     => { Test::Simple => ‘0.17’ },
    create_makefile_pl => ‘passthrough’,
    add_to_cleanup     => [’t/mason’],
)->create_build_script;

Much nicer, eh?