Alien::Base was first released in alpha form five years ago this month! The good things that Alien::Base (runtime) and Alien::Base::ModuleBuild (its installer ABMB) did when it was unleashed on the world are many, but chiefly:

It suggested a standard way of providing the compiler and linker flags needed to use an already installed alien. The original manifesto was pretty flip in terms of standards or best practices. It made it dead simple to create an Alien distribution that “alienized” a package that used autoconf and pkg-config, which probably covers a majority of open source libraries that you would be likely to want to “alienize”. (For those who are unfamiliar, autoconf provides a similar functionality to ExtUtils::MakeMaker in the C world and pkg-config is used to deal with dependencies in the C world). It made it possible with some work to create an Alien distribution that wrapped around a package that used vanilla Makefile 's, CMake, and in some cases crazy custom installers.

So when I was working on:

alienfile, a new recipe system for Alien Alien::Build, the implementation for that recipe system

intended as a modern pluggable alternative to ABMB, I wanted to make sure this new tech did these things at least as well. (In a github issue I mentioned the motivations for such a move, but briefly, ABMB is tightly coupled with Module::Build which has fallen out of favor and is no longer distributed as part of the Perl Core). In this dispatch I will cover how alienfile + Alien::Build make these things easy. In dispatches further down the line I will demonstrate what you can do with alienfile which is either hard or impossible with ABMB.

Most software package provide instructions on how to install them as a list of commands that you type into your shell. For example, the xz package which provides the command line program xz and the library liblzma can be installed using the standard procedure for autoconf based packages:

% ./configure % make % make install

So intuitively the simplest way to start with alienfile is to put those commands into an alienfile like this:

use alienfile; # This example is borrowed from the examples directory of the # Alien-Build distribution. # Use pkg-config to check if the library exists. # also, use which to check that the xz command is # in the path. probe [ 'pkg-config --exists liblzma', 'which xz', ]; # If the probe fails to find an already installed xz, the # "share" block contains instructions for downloading and # installing it. share { # the first download which succeeds will be used download [ 'wget http://tukaani.org/xz/xz-5.2.3.tar.gz' ]; download [ 'curl -O http://tukaani.org/xz/xz-5.2.3.tar.gz' ]; # use tar to extract the tarball extract [ 'tar zxf %{.install.download}' ]; # use the standard build process build [ './configure --prefix=%{.install.prefix} --disable-shared', '%{make}', '%{make} install', ]; }; # gather the details necessary for using the library, and store them # as runtime properties. gather [ # store the (chomped) output into the appropriate runtime properties [ 'pkg-config', '--modversion', 'liblzma', \'%{.runtime.version}' ], [ 'pkg-config', '--cflags', 'liblzma', \'%{.runtime.cflags}' ], [ 'pkg-config', '--libs', 'liblzma', \'%{.runtime.libs}' ], ];

If you have App::af installed, you can test this alienfile with the af download command:

% af download -f alienfile Alien::Build::CommandSequence> + wget http://tukaani.org/xz/xz-5.2.3.tar.gz --2017-03-25 12:48:14-- http://tukaani.org/xz/xz-5.2.3.tar.gz Resolving tukaani.org... 84.34.147.45 Connecting to tukaani.org|84.34.147.45|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 1490665 (1.4M) [application/x-gzip] Saving to: 'xz-5.2.3.tar.gz' xz-5.2.3.tar.gz 100%[=========================================================>] 1.42M 482KB/s in 3.0s 2017-03-25 12:48:17 (482 KB/s) - 'xz-5.2.3.tar.gz' saved [1490665/1490665] Alien::Build> single file, assuming archive Wrote archive to /Users/ollisg/dev/Alien-Build/example/xz-5.2.3.tar.gz

...and the af install command:

% af install -f alienfile --prefix=/tmp/foo ... lots of output... copied staged install into /tmp/foo --- cflags: -I/tmp/foo/include cflags_static: -I/tmp/foo/include install_type: share legacy: finished_installing: 1 install_type: share original_prefix: /tmp/foo version: 5.2.3 libs: -L/tmp/foo/lib -llzma libs_static: -L/tmp/foo/lib -llzma prefix: /tmp/foo version: 5.2.3

As you can see an alienfile is a series of steps which can be specified as a list of commands. Commands can use a simple macro or helper facility for portability. For example, instead of using make directly, it is advisable to use %{make} , since it will be replaced by dmake or nmake on platforms that use those names instead. Some packages require GNU Make, in which case you can use %{gmake} and be sure you get the right type of make (it is a good idea to request the upstream developer to add support for other versions of make for better portability too). If a command fails then it will stop the install. Steps can also be specified as a code reference when they can more easily be expressed as Perl code. If the code reference throws an exception it will stop the install. These are the basic steps that an alienfile will need to define in most cases:

probe - see if the library or tool is already installed on the system.

- see if the library or tool is already installed on the system. share - block containing steps for when the library or tool needs to be built from source. download - download, usually a tarball or zip file from the internet. extract - extract the files from that tarball or zip file. build - build the source.

- block containing steps for when the library or tool needs to be built from source.

There is also a sys block for steps that happen only during an install when the library or tool is already installed on the system, and a gather step, which gathers the details on how to use the library or tool that will be needed by the Alien runtime when the Alien is installed. The gather step can be placed in either or both of the share or sys block, allowing different gather mechanisms to be used depending on the install type. You can also put the gather (as in the example above) step outside of either bock, which is the same as putting the identical instructions in both blocks.

This manual example is great for seeing how alienfile works, but typically for autoconf and pkg-config based projects you will want to use plugins:

use alienfile; plugin 'PkgConfig' => 'liblzma'; plugin 'Probe::CommandLine' => ( command => 'xz', secondary => 1, ); share { plugin Download => ( url => 'http://tukaani.org/xz/', version => qr/^xz-([0-9\.]+)\.tar\.gz$/, ); plugin Extract => 'tar.gz'; plugin 'Build::Autoconf' => (); # the build step is only necessary if you need to customize the # options passed to ./configure. The default set by the # Build::Autoconf plugin is frequently sufficient. build [ '%{configure} --disable-shared', '%{make}', '%{make} install', ]; };

This does more or less the same thing as the previous example with a much more concise recipe. It does a number of things better than the first example though:

The PkgConfig plugin will pick the best method for querying the pkg-config database. This might be using the pkg-config command, or it might mean using the pure-perl alternative PkgConfig.pm on platforms that don't provide their own pkg-config.

The Download plugin will download the latest version of xz, not the specific version requested in the first alienfile. It also will work even if wget or curl aren't available, unlike the previous version.

or aren't available, unlike the previous version. The Build::Autoconf plugin is much more reliable for most autoconf packages (because it does a double staged install, ask me if you really want to know the details). It is also smart enough to work on windows, which is a tricky thing to do manually!

So that is a lot already. I can tell as your eyes are starting to glaze over! And you have already learned a lot. Next time I will show you how to integrate your alienfile recipe into an Alien distribution and how to use it from your XS module.