How to make “prereqs” of CPAN::Meta::Spec require a distribution instead of a package?

Question

I\'m researching about how to package some of my Perl apps and better manage their dependencies to make distribution easier for me and my customers, which most likely doesn\'t i

Answer 1

The Perl dependency system works entirely on package names, on multiple levels. When a CPAN distribution is uploaded, each package within is indexed by PAUSE, which also checks if the uploader has permissions for that package and that the package has a newer version than the currently indexed package. None of these checks care about the distribution as a whole (though the indexer does do other checks at that level).

Then, when a CPAN client sees a dependency, or you tell it to install something, it checks the index for that package name, which tells it what distribution release to install. If it depends on a certain version, that is checked against the $VERSION declared in that package if you have it installed; whereas once a distribution is installed, its "version" is no longer tracked. The distribution level is almost entirely meaningless except that it is what is ultimately downloaded and installed to satisfy these dependencies. This is important, because modules can and do move between distributions, maintaining their version increments, and the package index will always tell you which distribution to get the version you need.

As you noticed, the perl dependency is weird. It's a special case that has been there forever, as a convention to declare what version of Perl you require, you declare a runtime requirement of perl. It is not an indexed module, and every CPAN client and other consumer of CPAN metadata special cases this to either ignore it or treat it as a minimum Perl version, rather than something that can be installed. There's no way to extend this to work for distributions in general, and it would be a bad idea to try.

As an additional note, the CPAN meta spec is a specification for the file named META.json included in CPAN distributions (META.yml is the legacy version), but this file is automatically generated by your authoring tool. It should never be manually created, though you may have your authoring tool manually add certain keys (in which case reading the spec is important), including prereqs. See neilb's blog post for how to specify dependencies for various authoring tools, which will then transpose these into the generated META file, and also how to use cpanfiles to specify dependencies in general.