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Piers Cawley Practices Punditry

Wanted: module/starter.rb 5

Posted by Piers Cawley Sat, 14 Apr 2007 09:17:00 GMT

I sometimes think that one of the reasons that CPAN is such a huge advantage for Perl is the ease with which you can contribute to it. It’s all very well having a tool for installing libraries from the archive, any fool can do that, but CPAN has tools for getting started with a new library too.

If I want to start a new Perl project, I do:

module-starter --module=AuthenticationFairy

and the script goes away and builds me an AuthenticationFairy directory complete with all the boilerplate stuff filled in. I know that when I look in AuthenticationFairy I’ll find a sensible directory structure, a Makefile.PL that will do the right thing, a lib/AuthenticationFairy.pm with the documentation boiler plate filled in and a test directory. And I rejoice because my yaks have been sh aved and I can get on with the interesting business of writing my first test and making sure it fails.

I’ve not found an equivalent for Ruby. Yet.

I have found sow, which is part of the Hoe package, which is definitely a start.

Are there any other tools along the lines of Module::Starter that I’ve missed?

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  1. Avatar
    Sam Ruby about 4 hours later:

    Off-topic, but take a look at the html title that shows at the top of the browser window for this page, particularly in Mozilla.

    Also in Mozilla, take a look at your atom and rss20 feeds.

  2. Avatar
    Piers Cawley about 9 hours later:

    Damn. Blast. I thought we’d got that particular bit working.

    I’m punting for now and changing the title, but it’s going on the typo todo list.

  3. Avatar
    Pete Birkinshaw 6 days later:

    I’ve just stumbled across Newgem while reading an interview with Dr Nic. It’s for a gem rather than a standalone library/module, but it might do what you want.

  4. Avatar
    Piers Cawley 6 days later:

    Ooh… nice.

  5. Avatar
    Ovid 8 days later:

    You know, that doesn’t look like it should be too hard to write for Ruby. Long before Module::Starter came along, I had something similar to create my Perl modules.

    At first, it was a simple shell script making directories and using heredocs to write files.

    Then it was a simple shell script that also used Perl and Template Toolkit to write more complex stuff into those files.

    Later I added Subversion integration.

    I predict that if you create something, no matter how simple, to shave even a small portion of your Yak, that you’ll soon find large bald patches.

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