So that’s what ShipIt is!

In the last year or so I’ve been noticing that a lot of Perl modules contain a .shipit file. As I had no clue what it was about I searched the internet to see what ShipIt was and were to get it. But as you can see Google (or any other search engine) doesn’t return a link that describes. The name seems to be very common.

I figured as much that it was used to package up a module and simplify doing releases to CPAN. As well as integration with your SCM.

But never, never ever(!), did I think about looking up the name ShipIt on CPAN till today. I don’t know why I did so, but perhaps it’s because I’m still not very used to Perl modules being named anything different than Some::Long::Module::Name. Weird thing is that ShipIt first saw the light in 2007 (probably earlier, but the changelog doesn’t contain dates) so it’s out there for quite some time now. I must say I like these more decent names, as long as it doesn’t get as out of hand as it is with Ruby gems… How they name every single small gem as if it’s some sort of big ass application is beyond me. But who am I to judge about naming.

But that’s not why I’m writing this post. The main reason is for people, like me, to get to know the tool. I’m looking forward to using it to manage my modules so I don’t have to worry about updating version numbers, tagging the release in my SCM, test the final package and upload it to CPAN (or not). I know Dist::Zilla does this and a whole lot more as well, but I like Module::Install better. At least for now.

2 thoughts on “So that’s what ShipIt is!”

  1. Two things …

    One, you should’ve googled for “Shipit Perl”.

    Two, I’d strongly recommend dzil over shipit these days.

    Also, I agree that short names are good, at least for big enough projects.

  2. I know, but it never occurred to me.

    Dist::Zilla (or dzil for short) all seems very neat but in my point of view it does a bit too much. For me at least. I won’t say that I’ll never use it, because I probably will. But since it has such a broad feature set it’s a bit overwhelming. Nevertheless I should play around with it some time.

    Can Dist::Zilla be considered stable yet? I think the last time I took a look at it was maybe 6 months ago and all I ended up with was the dzil utility generating lots of errors (which were known of at that time). After that I never got to it again.

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