NAME

JSON::CPAN::Meta - (deprecated) replace META.yml with META.json

DESCRIPTION

Achtung! This library will soon be obsolete as tools move to use the official CPAN::Meta::Spec JSON files.

CPAN distributions contain a file, META.yml, which contains a description of the distribution and its contents. This document is notionally written in YAML, a powerful data serialization format. Perl has long lacked any reliable, full implementation of YAML. Instead, it has numerous incompatible and partial implementations.

One of the least complete implementations, YAML::Tiny has been advanced to be the standard mechanism for parsing these documents. This defeats the purpose of using a powerful serialization language without the benefit of a very simple and easily understood data format.

JSON, unlike YAML, is lacking in features but is extremely easy to parse and generate correctly. Further, JSON documents are almost always valid YAML documents. Thus, a META.yml file may contain JSON without violating the spec or introducing the sort of problems you'd expect from a poorly implemented YAML emitter... or so you'd think. In reality, the CPAN toolchain has become addicted to half-baked YAML implementations, in part because they're all we have an in part because the META.yml specification over-specifies what it means to be YAML, conflicting with the YAML specification itself!

JSON-CPAN-Meta contains plugins to allow distribution-building tools to produce META.json files that contain JSON content. This ditches all the baggage that goes along with META.yml in favor of a file that old tools won't find and that new tools will have no problem understanding.

SEE ALSO

ExtUtils::MakeMaker::JSONMETA

Module::Install::JSONMETA

Module::Build::JSONMETA

AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2009, Ricardo Signes, rjbs@cpan.org

This is free software, distributed under the same terms as perl5.