Arch Linux

http://xyne.archlinux.ca/info/pacpan
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=89752

I've completely rewritten pacpan and I feel that it is not mature enough to be officially recommended as a tool for packaging CPAN packages for Pacman. I would like to request support from the devs to make this an official policy. I will then update the Perl Packaging Guidelines in the wiki accordingly.

Please review the info page and the forum thread posted above for full information and output examples. I'll will only give a brief overview here:

Pacpan can match any module to it's distribution on CPAN and create a comprehensive PKGBUILD with fully populated depends, makedepends, optdepends and provides arrays. This will improve the ability of pacman to resolve dependencies for all CPAN packages and it will provide a consistency for all such packages. Each module maps to its distribution and each distribution maps to a standard pacman package.

There is also a function which inspects installed Perl packages and prints out a report which estimates their adherence to the naming guidelines and suggests name changes if they do not adhere. It can also generate a comprehensive "provides" array through direct detection of the files owned by the package. This will let packager's validate their provides arrays. Non-packages may also choose to update the provides array in the local database while waiting for packagers to update the packages. This will allows regular uses to satisfy dependencies as they wait.

As I said, this is just a brief summary. I would also like to add that the code is still fresh but I believe the functionality is already quite dependable

This will not be a fully automatic solution for all packages but it gives packagers a very good starting point and only a few tweaks will be requires at most in most cases.

If this proves to be reliable, I may also consider populating the AUR with CPAN PKGBUILDs via scripts the same way that the Arch Haskell teams does.