Why Alien:: Dists Should not be optional

[Shlomi Fish]

Alien:: distributions on CPAN (see https://github.com/Perl5-Alien ) should
not be made an optional requirement by their reverse deps because this will
mean duplicate logic at best, and a broken build process at worst.

For more info and some solutions for common problems, see:

* https://github.com/petdance/html-tidy5/pull/9

* https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=125972


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[Andy Lester]

Alien:: distributions on CPAN (see https://github.com/Perl5-Alien ) should
not be made an optional requirement by their reverse deps because this will
mean duplicate logic at best, and a broken build process at worst.

I’m not sure I see what you’re saying.  Are you saying that for something like HTML::Tidy5, that Tidy5 should somehow be required to use the corresponding Alien::Tidy5 module?

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi,

either it should have it as a hard dep, or it should implement something of its
own to detect if the library is present (but not download and install it).

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