Sometimes, one needs to deploy non-Perl files alongside a distribution. For that, we have File::ShareDir and its friends, which are lovely. But, alas, as the install of the shared files follows the same rules as the installation of module files, it has the same weakness: upon installation, CPAN clients will install files, but won’t remove any that aren’t relevant anymore.

That means that if, for example, version 1.0 of the distribution was having

share/foo share/bar

and version 1.1 changed that to

share/foo share/baz

then a user installing first version 1.0 then 1.1 will end up with

share/foo share/bar share/baz

which, depending of what you’re using those files for, might be a problem.

Let’s be sneaky

Fortunately, there is a clever little workaround in the case where you don’t want the files of past distributions to linger around. The trick is simple: bundle all the files to be shared into a tarball called shared-files.tar.gz. As there is now only that one file, which name always remains the same, any new install is conveniently clobbering the old version.

But.. that’s WORK!

Manually archiving the content of the share directory before any release is no fun. So I wrote Dist::Zilla::Plugin::ShareDir::Tarball which, upon the file munging stage, gathers all files in the share directory and build the shared-files.tar.gz archive with them. If there is no such files, the process is simply skipped.

Basically, adding this one plugin in the dist.ini of a project is all that is required on the package generation side. On the other end, one will be able to access that tarball the regular way:

#syntax: perl use File::ShareDir qw/ dist_dir /;

my $tarbar = dist_dir(‘My-Dist’).’/’.‘shared-files.tar.gz’;

So I have to extract the tarball? But… that’s WORK!

… Seriously?

Well, okay, fine, if there’s something I can understand, it’s laziness. Which is why I also wrote File::ShareDir::Tarball, which aims to behave exactly like good ol’ File::ShareDir, with the added magic that it’ll automatically extract the tarball for you, and return the path to the resulting extracted directory. So all there is to do would be

#syntax: perl use File::ShareDir::Tarball qw/ dist_dir /;

my $dir = dist_dir(‘My-Dist’);

For now, File::Sharedir::Tarball only accept dist_dir() because, well, there’s Elementary beginning in 10 minutes, but that’s nothing I can’t solve the next 15 minutes I feel mildly bored.

In the meantime, enjoy. :-)