TL;DR

Some ideas to use libraries while I’m developing them.

Sometimes I happen to be working on some code and rely on some other code that I’ve refactored into a separate library in a separate tree (usually, a separate Git repository too). Very often, this separate library is something that is not on CPAN and might possibly never end up there.

One alternative is to produce a package and put it in a DarkPAN kind of thing, so that I use the toolchain just as I would do with regular libraries. This might get in the way of developing code, though, especially in a lone-coder scenario where I don’t really need too much cerimony because, well, I’m the only coder. Why? It’s clunky to generate a new package and install it for each change.

One alternative I came up with is to have a clone of the Git repository under the local sub-directory, where also the local modules are installed by Carton (remember Installing Perl Modules? They end up in local/lib/perl5). So I might end up with something along the lines:

myproject
  bin
    the-program
  lib
  local
    lib
      perl5
        ... modules installed with Carton...
    some-library
      lib
    some-other-library
      lib

Now it’s just a matter of invoking local-lib (Another trick for PERL5LIB) with the right targets:

$ local-lib lib local/some-library/lib local/some-other-library/lib

or, of course, setting it in a wrapper shell script, should I need it.

I know, this is super-clunky too.

I took a look in CPAN and there seem to be some attempts at solving a similar problem, although not the same. So I’m meditating on a small lib:: module (like lib::src or something like this) to allow automating the inclusion of this kind of ongoing development stuff easily.

The idea would be to reshape the directory structure, like this:

myproject
  bin
    the-program
  lib
  local
    lib
      perl5
        ... modules installed with Carton...
    src
      some-library
        lib
      some-other-library
        lib

i.e. move these sourcey libraries/Git clones in a specific sub-directory, and then include all stuff there like this in bin/the-program:

use FindBin '$Bin';
use lib::src "$Bin/../local/src";

This in turn should look inside local/src for all sub-directories that have a lib and add them to @INC. Or, even, look for their local/lib/perl5 sub-directories too…

Let’s see!