Lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy, oops!

Among my many personal failings, there are two that conspire to cause me more professional embarrassment than most others: I am lazy, and I am sloppy. I don't want to do a lot of inspection to ensure that I haven't made a mistake, and I do not have a supernatural talent for not making mistakes. I do my crosswords in pen, but by the time I'm done, there's very little room left to fill in the right answers, because of all the crossed-out wrong ones.

Some might suggest that the solution to these problems is to grow as a person, take more time on my work, check things more carefully, and be more diligent in the first place. Fortunately for me, those people are wrong. The solution is to be even lazier.

I used to forget to add all my prereqs to my dists' Makefile.PLs. I'd add a use Foo::Bar somewhere, I wouldn't list it as a prereq, and my tests would pass, but somebody else's would not, because they would not have already installed Foo::Bar, and wouldn't be told to, because I was lazy and screwed up. I tried using Test::Without::Module fruitlessly for a while, but eventually I realized it was never going to work: TWM was for hiding things without which the dist should work. I wanted to solve a different problem. I wanted to make sure that everything I needed was listed somewhere.

Laziness helped. I did nothing (other than release a few more broken dists) and eventually Jérôme Quelin released the excellent Dist::Zilla::Plugin::AutoPrereqs, which became entirely indispensable so quickly that it was brought into the core Dist-Zilla distribution.

Lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy again, oops!

Now I had a new problem.

I went and deleted almost all the prereq declarations from my dist.ini files and let AutoPrereqs sort it out for me. It did much better than I did: it picked up modules I forgot, or that I mistakenly thought were core. It picked up the versions that I required, which led me to more often put version requirements in the code, where they belonged. It better sorted my library requirements between testing prereqs and runtime prereqs. It knew to look not just at files in ./lib but also in ./t.

It even knew how to detect most of my internal for-testing-only packages – but not all of them. Sometimes it would still add a prereq on t::lib::SomeTest, or some internal package I was setting up strangely. Worse, sometimes it would (quite reasonably) pick up a require Foo::Bar statement from a test, well after a line saying to skip the whole test unless Foo was available – quite clear to a human, and totally reasonable in practice, but not good enough for a stupid static analyzer.

These dists would get released with a bunch of prereqs that didn't make sense and couldn't be installed. make test would still work, but anyone trying to install would be stymied by the bogus requirements. I thought about just waiting this one out, to see if Jérôme Quelin would be my savior again, but then I realized that Tatsuhiko Miyagawa had already done a bunch of the work: I could just check every prereq against his simple CPAN Meta DB service. If the package didn't appear in the CPAN index, a release would be a bad idea.

Hooray for lazy!

Implementing the whole thing took only about a hundred lines of code. Adding the plugin to every one of my dists' configurations took about one line of code. The plugin has already saved me dozens of broken releases, and will surely save me more as time goes on. It's not my favorite thing that I wrote in 2011, but it has probably most often saved me from looking like an idiot.

See Also

• Dist::Zilla::Plugin::CheckPrereqsIndexed

• Test::Without::Module