Well here we are

[Chip Turner]

Dennis Gregorovic <dgregor at redhat.com> writes:

> Here are some ideas off the top of my head:
>  * Have cpanflute2 discover if the package is noarch or not, and set up 
>    the %build, %install, and %files sections accordingly.

If you have perl-Archive-Tar and perl-Compress-Zlib (or is it
perl-IO-Zlib these days?) installed, it will already do this.  It is a
lousy heuristic (walk the tarball, see if ther are any .xs, .c, or .h
files), but in practice it works pretty much 100%.

>  * Have cpanflute2 query CPAN to automatically fill in %version, %URL,
>    %Source0

It should automatically fill in version, but cpanflute2 operates from
the tarball, so it bases it on the version in the tarball's filename.

>  * Have cpanflute2 look for common doc files and add them to %docs

It already does this too.  It relies on the 'make install' of the
perl module to copy them, but it does flag a variety of commonly named
files as %doc.

> The workflow I picture is:
> $ cpanflute2 Test::AutoBuild
>   ... looking up Test::AutoBuild
>   ... downloading Test::AutoBuild-1.0.3
>   ... examining Test-AutoBuild-1.0.3.tar.gz
>   ... writing perl-Test-AutoBuild.spec
> $ emacs perl-Test-AutoBuild.spec
>  <visual inspection.  make any needed changes>

Ah, this is the rub.  Right now, cpanflute2 operates on an
already-provided tarball.  You have to download it on your own.

Downloading from CPAN is, unfortunately, not an entirely clean
operation.  At least, it wasn't last time I looked.  You need to worry
about mirrors, and about finding a module by a given name, etc.
Unfortunately, as of now, there isn't a very clean way to do that from
what I understand.  cpan2rpm jumps through several different hoops to
download packages; I'm just not sure that it is the right thing to do
inside of cpanflute2.  It is the area they can definitely say they are
better, but I'm not sure I like the price of meeting them there.

> This is similar to Ville's process.  I'm just wondering how many of the
> 'blanks' we can fill in automatically.
>
> Apologies in advance if any of these features are already implemented.

No problem!  Not like there is a page listing cpanflute2's features
anyway :)

Chip

-- 
Chip Turner                   cturner at pattern.net