Question

I’m trying to set up a large-ish project, written in Perl. The IBM MakeMaker tutorial has been very helpful so far, but I don’t understand how to link all the modules into the main program. In my project root, I have MANIFEST, Makefile.PL, README, a bin directory, and a lib directory. In my bin directory, I have my main script (Main.pl). In the lib directory, I have each of my modules, divided up into their own respective directories (i.e. Utils::Util1 and Utils::Utils2 in the utils directory, etc). In each module directory, there is also a t directory, containing tests

My MANIFEST file has the following:

bin/Main.pl
lib/Utils/Util1.pm
lib/Utils/Util2.pm
lib/Utils/t/Utils1.t
lib/Utils/t/Utils2.t
Makefile.PL
MANIFEST
README

Makefile.PL is the following:

use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;
WriteMakefile(
    'NAME'=>'Foo',
    'VERSION_FROM'=>'bin/Main.pl',
    'PREREQ_PM'=>{
    "XML::Simple"=> 2.18}, #The libraries that we need and their
                   #minimum version numbers
    'EXE_FILES' =>[("bin/Main.pl")]
);

After I make and run, the program crashes, complaining that it cannot find Utils::Util1, and when I run ‘make test, it says no tests defined. Can anyone make any suggestions? I have never done a large scale project like this in perl, and I will need to add many more modules

Answer 1

Try this structure:

bin/Main.pl
lib/Utils/Util1.pm
lib/Utils/Util2.pm
Makefile.PL
MANIFEST
README
t/Utils1.t
t/Utils2.t

As ysth said, make does not install your modules, it just builds them in a blib directory. (In your case it just copies them there, but if you had XS code, it would be compiled with a C compiler.) Use make install to install your modules for regular scripts to use.

If you want to run your script between make and make install, you can do:

perl -Mblib bin/Main.pl

The -Mblib instructs perl to temporarily add the appropriate directories to the search path, so you can try out an uninstalled module. (make test does that automatically.)