NAME

Alien::patch - Find or build patch

VERSION

version 0.11

SYNOPSIS

 use Alien::patch ();
 use Env qw( @PATH );
 
 unshift @ENV, Alien::patch->bin_dir;
 my $patch = Alien::patch->exe;
 system "$patch -p1 < foo.patch";

Or with Alien::Build::ModuleBuild:

 use Alien::Base::ModuleBuild;
 Alien::Base::ModuleBuild->new(
   ...
   alien_bin_requires => {
     'Alien::patch' => '0.08',
   },
   alien_build_commands => {
     '%{patch} -p1 < foo.patch',
   },
   ...
 )->create_build_script;

DESCRIPTION

Many environments provide the patch command, but a few do not. Using this module in your Build.PL (or elsewhere) you can make sure that patch will be available. If the system provides it, then great, this module is a no-op. If it does not, then it will download and install it into a private location so that it can be added to the PATH when this module is used.

This class is a subclass of Alien::Base, so all of the methods documented there should work with this class.

METHODS

exe

 my $exe = Alien::patch->exe;

Returns the command to run patch on your system. For now it simply adds the --binary option on Windows (MSWin32 but not cygwin) which is usually what you want.

HELPERS

patch

 %{patch}

When used with Alien::Base::ModuleBuild in a alien_build_commands or alien_install_commands, this helper will be replaced by either patch (Unix and cygwin) or patch --binary (MSWin32).

CAVEATS

This version of Alien::patch adds patch to your path, if it isn't already there when you use it, like this:

 use Alien::patch;  # deprecated, issues a warning

This was a design mistake, and now deprecated. When Alien::patch was originally written, it was one of the first Alien tool style modules on CPAN. As such, the author and the Alien::Base team hadn't yet come up with the best practices for this sort of module. The author, and the Alien::Base team feel that for consistency and for readability it is better use Alien::patch without the automatic import:

 use Alien::patch ();

and explicitly modify the PATH yourself (examples are above in the synopsis). The old style will issue a warning. The old behavior will be removed, but not before 31 January 2018.

AUTHOR

Graham Ollis <plicease@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2017 by Graham Ollis.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.