13.9 Trivial make dist

After some testing, you may decide it's time to share your work with friends and associates. To do this, make a single distribution file. Many mechanisms are available to do this, but the most common one on most modern Unix platforms is the GNU gzip compressed tar archive, commonly named with a .tar.gz or .tgz extension.

Again, with a simple make invocation (make dist), you end up with the required file:

$ make dist
rm -rf Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01
/usr/local/bin/perl "-MExtUtils::Manifest=manicopy,maniread" \
        -e "manicopy(maniread(  ),'Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01', 'best');"
mkdir Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01
mkdir Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01/t
tar cvf Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01.tar Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01
Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01/
Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01/Changes
Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01/Makefile.PL
Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01/MANIFEST
Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01/Maps.pm
Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01/README
Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01/t/
Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01/t/1.t
rm -rf Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01
gzip --best Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01.tar

Now there's a file named Island-Plotting-Maps-0.01.tar.gz in the directory. The version number in the name comes from the module's $VERSION variable.^[16]

^[16] If there's more than one module, you need to designate the primary module in the Makefile.PL.