Perl Module Dependencies: how to require the latest, and nothing less

entry originally published on the Pythian blog.

Recently, hanekomu was contemplating how to make subsequent installs of a Task::BeLike module upgrade its dependencies to their latest version.

The idea is intriguing. It’s not something you want to do for a typical module, but it makes sense in the context of Task::BeLike. If you care enough about a module to put it in your Task::BeLike, you probably care enough to want to upgrade when there’s a new version out there.

Alas, I think hanekomu’s proposed way of doing it is flawed (mind you, the debate is still going on as of the writing of this entry, and I can very well still be proven wrong). But after some pondeferous chin scratching, I might have come with a cunning alternative to it.

Let’s say that in your Build.PL (the logic would be the same for a Makefile.PL) you have your dependencies stashed in %dependencies. Something akin to:

%dependencies = (
    XML::LibXML      => 0,          # any version will do
    XML::XPathScript => '1.42',     # 1.42 or higher
    Moose            => 'latest',   # nothing but the shiniest!
);

All we want to do, really, is to switch the latest for, well, the latest version available. Surprisingly, that something that is almost as easy to do than to say:

for my $mod ( keys %dependencies ) {
    next unless $dependencies{$mod} eq 'latest';

    require CPANPLUS::Backend;
    state $cb = CPANPLUS::Backend->new;

    $dependencies{$mod} = $cb->module_tree( $mod )->package_version;
}

Yes, that’s really all there is to it. A little further hacking later, I have incorporated the functionality to my own Task::BeLike::YANICK module. The way I implemented it, installing the module the usual way will yield no surprise (i.e., dependencies already present are not going to be updated). But if the environment variable TASK_UPGRADE is set to true, like so:

TASK_UPGRADE=1 cpan -f Task::BeLike::YANICK

 . . . then the magic is going to be unleashed (the -f is to force the re-install, if the Task has already been installed before).

Alternatively, just to know which dependencies are out-of-date, one can also extract the distribution and do a

perl ./Build.PL --upgrade
./Build prereq_report