Why does META.yml claim to provide the Term::ReadKey package?

[thaljef]

Starting in 2.37, the dist metadata says that META.yml is the file that provides the Term::ReadKey package. This appears to be deliberately injected by the ADD_META in Makefile.PL. This throws off Module::Metadata (used by Metacpan and Pinto) which expect the file to be something that looks like source code (usually either a .pm or .PL file). Can you help @mschout and myself understand why it is being done this way. See also thaljef/Pinto#241

[chizmw]

Aha! I got bitten by this problem this morning, trying to pull 2.37 into our pinto repo at work. I'd be interested to know what's happening here too.

[hartzell]

[edit, calmer wording]

This has bitten me too. What's behind this?

[hartzell]

This is biting me again and I can no longer fix it by pinning to the older (2.33) version because that has a bug with the number of tests that are skipped when running without a TTY that keeps the tests from passing when being built as part of a Jenkins job.

The Makefile.PL for this package contains this bit:

        provides  => {
            'Term::ReadKey' => {
                file    => 'META.yml',
                version => '2.37',
            },
        },

which leads to this bit in the META.json:

   "provides" : {
      "Term::ReadKey" : {
         "file" : "META.yml",
         "version" : "2.37"
      }
   },

The provides section of the CPAN Meta Spec says:

This field is required. It must contain a Unix-style relative file path from the root of the distribution directory to a file that contains or generates the package. It may be given as META.yml or META.json to claim a package for indexing without needing a *.pm.

There is no actual Term/ReadKey.pm in the source tree to point at, I think that the package is doing the right thing and that thaljef/Pinto#241 should be generalized for the case where the "file" is META.{yaml,json} to follow the spec.

[hartzell]

Alternatively, it seems as if used ReadKey_pm.PL instead of META.yml would also fulfill the META spec.

[mschout]

I submitted a PR to pinto that fixes this in Pinto. I'd consider this issue closed as its perfectly valid per the CPAN Meta Spec to declare a provides file of META.yml like this.

[hartzell]

I'm not sure what Pinto's release schedule is. It might be nice to mitigate the issue on this side (and perhaps make the metacpan search results less confusing). See #31

[hartzell]

Ack. That renaming doesn't work. It fails to match this regex in sub is_simile here:

    $file =~ s|\.pm(?:\.PL)?||;

Renaming the file to ReadKey.pm.PL and touching up Makefile.PL and MANIFEST (and setting SIGN to false) result in a distribution that passes its tests and that Pinto can index as is.

[mschout]

The fix for this has already been merged into Pinto. I'm guessing @thaljef will release a fixed version soon, which makes all of this pointless. What Term::ReadKey is doing is perfectly valid according to the CPAN Meta Spec. This was a Pinto problem, not a Term::ReadKey problem.

[Grinnz]

There is a file which generates the source code for this module so there's no need to use META.yml, so I'd still consider this a valid issue, without an explanation for why this was done.

[jonathanstowe]

I have just pushed 2.38 which includes the above PR