Perl 6 module ecosystem – news and ideas

I’ve looked a bit into S22 recently, and I thought it would be fun to try to implement some subset of it in neutro and see how it will turn out. Well done is better than well said, so I did. More thinking on the subject and I decided to mangle the module ecosystem itself a bit to suit the new capabilities nicely. I gave life to a fork of perl6/ecosystem. How is it different? Let’s see. It no longer contains a list of the git repo urls, rather it keeps the urls of the META.info files known to it, and a script which downloads all of them and puts in a nice projects.json file containing all the metadata of the modules: descriptions, proper names (goodbye perl6-Acme-Meow, welcome Acme::Meow), dependencies, probably more eventually. But wait, what is this META.info magic? Let’s see how it looks for neutro:

{
    "name"        : "neutro",
    "version"     : "*",
    "description" : "A simple module installer for Perl 6 modules",
    "depends"     : [ "File::Tools", "Module::Tools", "JSON::Tiny" ],
    "repo-type"   : "git",
    "repo-url"    : "git://github.com/tadzik/neutro.git"
}

So all you have to do (if you want to, of course), is to create such file in the root directory in your module’s repo, let me know so I can add it to my ecosystem fork and bam! your module is now a part of the new ecosystem. Easy-peasy.

Neutro now handles the new way pretty nicely, it only needs JSON::Tiny (a new dependency: whee!) in the new ecosystem so it can bootstrap itself properly.

So, what do you think about the new way? Ideas, criticism, excitement?

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