Re: Bug#1052224: ITP: libalien-base-modulebuild-perl -- subclass of Module::Build for building Alien:: modules and their libraries

Gregor Herrmann writes:
> Alien::Build is already questionable¹, although I admit that patching
> the requirement out can be a bit cumbersome [...]
>
> ¹ it's great for e.g. Windows where building C libraries is a pain
> but on Debian it's problematic as downloading stuff from the internet
> is not something we can or want to do

Usually, Alien::Build does only download files if a library or its 
development files aren't available on the system. This is not only true 
for Windows but also for CPAN smokers. If libalien-build-perl is only 
used to build other Debian packages, neither a dependency on Mozilla::CA 
nor ca-certificates is required.

If you would like to write portable Perl modules that link to a C 
library, you can either add the library's source code to your module, 
which DBD::SQLite does for example, or use Alien::Build. Even with 
Alien::Build, I had to adapt one of my XS modules to weird CPAN smokers 
with C compilers with optimizer bugs, strange include and library paths, 
broken math on some architectures etc.