Menlo - A CPAN client
Menlo is a backend for cpanm 2.0, developed with the goal to replace cpanm internals with a set of modules that are more flexible, extensible and easier to use.
Menlo is developed within cpanminus git repository at Menlo subdirectory at https://github.com/miyagawa/cpanminus
Menlo::CLI::Compat started off as a copy of App::cpanminus::script, but will go under a big refactoring to extract all the bits out of it. Hopefully the end result will be just a shim and translation layer to interpret command line options.
cpanm has been a popular choice of CPAN package installer for many developers, because it is lightweight, fast, and requires no configuration in most environments.
Meanwhile, the way cpanm has been implemented (one God class, and all modules are packaged in one script with fatpacker) makes it difficult to extend, or modify the behaviors at a runtime, unless you decide to fork the code or monkeypatch its hidden backend class.
cpanm also has no scriptable API or hook points, which means if you want to write a tool that works with cpanm, you basically have to work around its behavior by writing a shell wrapper, or parsing the output of its standard out or a build log file.
Menlo will keep the best aspects of cpanm, which is dependencies free, configuration free, lightweight and fast to install CPAN modules. At the same time, it's impelmented as a standard perl module, available on CPAN, and you can extend its behavior by either using its modular interfaces, or writing plugins to hook into its behaviors.
Menlo is a set of libraries and uses non-core CPAN modules as its dependencies. App-cpanminus distribution embeds Menlo and all of its runtime dependencies into a fatpacked binary, so that you can install App-cpanminus or Menlo without having any CPAN client to begin with.
Right now it's just a library name, but I'm comfortable calling this a new package name for cpanm 2's backend.
Tatsuhiko Miyagawa <miyagawa@bulknews.net>
2010- Tatsuhiko Miyagawa
This software is licensed under the same terms as Perl.