NAME

PACKAGING - notes and best practice for packaging perl 5

SYNOPSIS

This document is aimed at anyone who is producing their own version of perl for distribution to other users. It is intended as a collection of useful tips, advice and best practice, rather than being a complete packaging manual. The starting point for installing perl remains INSTALL.

Customizing test running

A small number of porting tests (those in t/porting) are not well suited to typical distribution packaging scenarios. For example, they assume they are working in a git clone of the upstream Perl repository, or enforce rules which are not relevant to downstream packagers. These can be skipped by setting the environment variable PERL_BUILD_PACKAGING. A complete list of tests which this applied to can be found by searching the codebase for this string.

An alternative strategy would be to skip all porting tests, but many of them are useful if additional patches might be applied.

Customizing patchlevel to advertise your local patches

You can advertise your custom local patches by using patchlevel.h as a standalone Perl script.

Sample usage:

perl -x patchlevel.h "This is a custom patch"

Disabling known flapping tests

Some tests could fail under heavy load, whereas in most cases they would simply succeed. Usually, continuous integration systems will at one point or the other reach that problem.

To disable these known tests, please set the environment variable CI to true.

CI=true