About this series: A collection of short blog posts about lcpan tips/recipes. Some posts will also end up in the upcoming App::lcpan::Manual::Cookbook POD to be included in the App::lcpan distribution. First article is here. See the whole series.

About lcpan: an application to download and index a mini CPAN mirror on your local filesystem, so in effect you will have something like your own CPAN with a command-line tool (or perl API) to query and extract information from your mirror. I find it perfect for my own personal use when working offline.

Before writing Dist::Zilla::Plugin::Prereqs::CheckCircular, from time to time I would end up with circular dependencies in my distributions. For example, I have module A, then write B which depends on A, then write C which depends on B. Later after some hacking I would add C as a dependency to A. Boom, circularity. Installing A becomes impossible because to install A it needs C, which needs B, which needs A… This is usually reported to me by the relentless SREZIC via https://rt.cpan.org, but after a few times I thought it might be a good idea to prevent this from happening in the first place.

The CheckCircular plugin utilizes lcpan to accomplish its goal. First, it gathers the list of modules in the current distribution. Let's say we're building distribution A which contains just a single module A.

Then, the plugin gathers the list of distribution RuntimeRequires prereqs (let's say C D E), then feeds it to lcpan mods --or -x :

% lcpan mods --or -x C D E

This basically filters out modules that do not exist on CPAN because the above commands finds any ( --or ) module with names exactly matching ( -x ) the given names. Suppose E is unindexed on CPAN, then the above command will simply output:

C D

The output of the above command is then fed to lcpan deps -R , which will list all dependencies recursively. Let's say D depends on F and nothing else, while C as we know depends on B, which depends on A. The output of the above command will be:

F B A

The plugin now checks whether in the above list of dependencies, there is any of the current distributions' modules among them. In this case, there is (A). Thus, there is circular dependency and the build is aborted by the plugin.