NAME Alien::gmake - Find or build GNU Make VERSION version 0.19 SYNOPSIS use Alien::gmake (); use Env qw( @PATH ); unshift @ENV, Alien::gmake->bin_dir; my $gmake = Alien::gmake->exe; system $gmake, 'all'; system $gmake, 'install'; Or with Alien::Build::ModuleBuild: use Alien::Base::ModuleBuild; Alien::Base::ModuleBuild->new( ... alien_bin_requires => { 'Alien::gmake' => '0.09', }, alien_build_commands => { "%{gmake}", }, alien_install_commands => { "%{gmake} install", }, ... )->create_build_script; DESCRIPTION Some packages insist on using GNU Make. Some platforms refuse to come with GNU Make. Sometimes you just want to be able to build packages that require GNU Make without having to check the version of Make each time. This module is for that. It uses the system provided GNU Make if it can be found. Otherwise it will download and install it into a directory not normally in your path so that it can be used when you use Alien::gmake. This way you can use it when you need it, but not muck up your environment when you don't. If possible, it is better to fix the package so that it doesn't require GNU make extensions, making it more portable. Unfortunately, sometimes this isn't an option. This class is a subclass of Alien::Base, so all of the methods documented there should work with this class. METHODS exe my $gmake = Alien::gmake->exe; Return the "name" of GNU make. Normally this is either make or gmake. On Windows (and possibly other platforms), it may be the full path to the GNU make executable. To be usable on all platforms you will have to first add directories returned from bin_dir to your PATH, for example: use Alien::gmake (); use Env qw( @PATH ); unshift @PATH, Alien::gmake->bin_dir; system "@{[ Alien::gmake->exe ]}"; system "@{[ Alien::gmake->exe ]} install"; bin_dir my @dir = Alien::gmake->bin_dir; Returns the list of directories that should be added to PATH in order for the shell to find GNU make. If GNU make is already in the PATH, this will return the empty list. For example: use Alien::gmake (); use Env qw( @PATH ); unshift @PATH, Alien::gmake->bin_dir; HELPERS gmake %{gmake} Returns either make or gmake depending on how GNU make is called on your system. CAVEATS This version of Alien::gmake adds GNU make to your path, if it isn't already there when you use it, like this: use Alien::gmake; # deprecated, issues a warning This was a design mistake, and now deprecated. When Alien::gmake 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::gmake without the automatic import: use Alien::gmake (); 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 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE This software is copyright (c) 2014 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.