Managing External Raku Dependencies using Sparrow

A few days ago several discussions have been launched where people try to deal with managing none Raku / native dependencies for Raku modules. While a solution is far from being found or at least is complete here is my, Sparrow take on the problem.

Raku-native-deps

Raku-native-deps is a Sparrow plugin to parse META6.json file and turn it to native packages dependencies. It has a lot of limitations, e.g only supporting CentOS and only parsing `:from<native>` statements but it could give one a sence of the approach:

my %state = task-run "get packages", "raku-native-deps", %(
  path => "META6.json"
);

for %state<packages><> -> $i {
  say "package: $i<package>"
}

Basically one just give it a path to module’s META file and the plugin parses the file converting it to native package dependencies, then it’s possible to install ones using underlying package manager:

for %state<packages><> -> $i {
  package-install $i<package>
}

Full scenario

So full scenario to install a module with native dependencies would be:

# Fetch module and get a directory where it's fetched
my %state = task-run 'fetch dbd-sqlite', 'zef-fetch', %(
  identity => 'DBD::SQLite'
);

# Build native packages list from META6.json
my %state2 = task-run "get packages", "raku-native-deps", %(
  path => "{%state<directory>}/META6.json"
);

# Install native packages (libsqlite3)
for %state2<packages><> -> $i {
  package-install $i<package>;
}

# Install module, at this point external dependencies are installed
# So this step will only install Raku dependencies and module itself

zef "DBD::SQLite";

RakuDist integration

RakuDist – Raku modules testing service uses the method to test distributions containing native dependencies. Known modules examples:

DBD::SQLite ( META6 pull request – https://github.com/CurtTilmes/raku-dbsqlite/pull/10 )
LibCurl ( META6 pull request – https://github.com/CurtTilmes/raku-libcurl/pull/15 )
GPGME ( META6 pull request – https://github.com/CurtTilmes/raku-gpgme/pull/1 )

Further thoughts

The approach is not complete, though right now it could solve installation of native dependencies for a single module ( but not recursively for module’s dependencies’s native dependencies ), one can read ongoing discussion here – https://github.com/ugexe/zef/issues/356 and suggest ideas.


Thanks for reading

—

Aleksei