After four months of development and 15 development releases along the way, I’m pleased to announce that Module::Build 0.36 is now on CPAN. Version 0.36 will also be included in the next release of the Perl 5.11.X development series. I would like to thank everyone who contributed patches, suggestions, testing or other support to enable this release.
Summary of major changes since 0.35 🔗︎
Enhancements 🔗︎
- Added ‘Build installdeps’ action to install needed dependencies via a user-configurable command line program. (Defaults to ‘cpan’.)
- Command line options may be set via the PERL_MB_OPT environment variable (similar to PERL_MM_OPT in ExtUtils::MakeMaker)
- Generates MYMETA.yml during Build.PL (new standard protocol for communicating configuration results between toolchain components)
- Reduced amount of console output under normal operation (use –verbose to see all output)
- Added experimental inc/ bundling; see Module::Build::Bundling for details.
New or changed properties 🔗︎
- Added ‘share_dir’ property to provide File::ShareDir support; File::ShareDir automatically added to ‘requires’ if ‘share_dir’ is set
- Added ’needs_compiler’ property. Defaults to true if XS or c_source exist. If true, ExtUtils::CBuilder is also added to build_requires.
- ‘C_support’ is no longer an optional feature. Modern ExtUtils::CBuilder and ExtUtils::ParseXS added to the ‘requires’ list. This ensures that upgrading Module::Build will upgrade these critical modules.
- Clarified that ‘apache’ in the license attribute indicates the Apache License 2.0 and added ‘apache_1_1’ for the older version of the license
Deprecations 🔗︎
- Module::Build::Compat ‘passthrough’ style has been deprecated. Using ‘passthrough’ will issue warnings on Makefile.PL generation. See Module::Build::Compat documentation for rationale.
Internals 🔗︎
- Replaced use of YAML.pm with YAML::Tiny; Module::Build::YAML is now based on YAML::Tiny as well
- A new get_metadata() method has been added as a simpler wrapper around the old, kludgy prepare_metadata() API.
- Replaced guts of new_from_context(). Build.PL is now executed in a separate process before resume() is called. (This is generally only of interest to Module::Build or toolchain developers)
- Add support for ‘package NAME VERSION’ syntax added in Perl 5.11.1
Notable bug fixes 🔗︎
- The “test” action now dies when using the ‘use_tap_harness’ option and tests fail, matching the behavior under Test::Harness.
- Updated PPM generation to PPM v4
- When module_name is not supplied, no packlist was being written; fixed by guessing module_name from dist_version_from or the directory name (just like ExtUtils::Manifest does without NAME)
- Failure to detect a compiler will now warn during Build.PL and be a fatal error when trying to compile during Build
- Auto-detection of abstract and author fixed for mixed-case POD headers
- resume() was not restoring additions to @INC added in Build.PL
- When tarball paths are less than 100 characters, disables ‘prefix’ mode of Archive::Tar for maximum compatibility
- Merging ‘requires’ and ‘build_requires’ in Module::Build::Compat could lead to duplicate PREREQ_PM entries; now the highest version is used for PREREQ_PM.
- Module::Build::Compat will now die with an error if advanced, non-numeric prerequisites are given, as these are not supported by ExtUtils::MakeMaker in PREREQ_PM