PACKAGING

If you read this file _as_is_, just ignore the funny characters you
see.  It is written in the POD format (see pod/perlpod.pod) which is
specifically designed to be readable as is.

=head1 NAME

PACKAGING - notes and best practice for packaging perl 5

=head1 SYNOPSIS

This document is aimed at anyone who is producing their own version of
perl for distribution to other users. It is intended as a collection
of useful tips, advice and best practice, rather than being a complete
packaging manual. The starting point for installing perl remains
F<INSTALL>.

=head1 Customizing test running

A small number of porting tests (those in t/porting) are not well suited
to typical distribution packaging scenarios. For example, they assume
they are working in a git clone of the upstream Perl repository, or
enforce rules which are not relevant to downstream packagers. These can
be skipped by setting the environment variable PERL_BUILD_PACKAGING.
A complete list of tests which this applied to can be found by searching
the codebase for this string.

An alternative strategy would be to skip all porting tests, but many of
them are useful if additional patches might be applied.

=head1 Customizing patchlevel to advertise your local patches

You can advertise your custom local patches by using patchlevel.h as a
standalone Perl script.

=head2 Sample usage:

		perl -x patchlevel.h "This is a custom patch"

=head1 Disabling known flapping tests

Some tests could fail under heavy load, whereas in most cases
they would simply succeed. Usually, continuous integration systems
will at one point or the other reach that problem.

To disable these known tests, please set the environment
variable CI to true.

        CI=true

=cut