Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Bundles

The CPAN module recognizes a bundle as a Perl module in the namespace Bundle:: that does not define any functions or methods and usually contains only pod documentation. It starts like a Perl module with a package declaration and a $VERSION variable. After that, the pod section looks like any other pod except that it contains a special section that begins with:

=head1 CONTENTS

This section consists of lines such as:

                  Module_Name [Version_String] [- optional text]

in which Module_Name is the name of a module (for example, Term::ReadLine), not the name of a distribution file, and the version and text are optional. If there is text, it is preceded by a -. The distribution of a bundle should follow the same convention as other distributions.

Bundles are treated specially in the CPAN package. When you tell CPAN to install a bundle, it installs all the modules in the CONTENTS section of the pod. You can install your own bundles locally by placing a conforming bundle file somewhere in your @INC path. The autobundle command available in the shell interface does that for you by including all currently installed modules in a snapshot bundle file (see Chapter 2).