Currently, I’m grappling with CPANMinus and Dist::Zilla, two acclaimed Perl modules for distribution management.

CPANMinus removed its plugin infrastructure, through which Dist::Zilla was supported, in late 2010. While the plugins themselves are still extant (as reminders, almost, to fix the damn’ problem), there is no working code.

Atop this, Dist::Zilla provides no obvious sane way to ‘build’ a module — to copy it into a staging area akin to ExtUtils::MakeMaker’s blib — and the documentation is fuzzy in the extreme.

While everyone else is heralding the novelty and beauty of Dist::Zilla, I’ll take Module::Build or ExtUtils::MakeMaker over it any day. It seems to me to be obfuscating a perfectly clear build process by tucking it away inside countless layers of abstraction.

Usually I’m all for abstraction, except at the cost of obvious transparency and/or lack of documentation. Blergh.