Alien::Base Grant - Report #9 (Final)
Wed, 08-May-2013 by
Makoto Nozaki
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< and [Acme::Ford::Prefect](http://www.cpantesters.org/distro/A/Acme-Ford-Prefect.html); until these reports come in I cannot assess the ability of my recent work to compensate for this so-called "blib-scheme".
I am happy to report that I have received much interest in the project and even some patches to the code-base.
I am confident that the project will continue to progress; for my part I will continue to contribute and shepherd patches/pull-requests.
Certainly the system is still in a rather basic form, for example HTTP support is still rather fragile, but the major architecture exists and will continue to improve.
## Deliverables
* [Alien::Base](https://metacpan.org/module/Alien::Base) is released to CPAN and is even being used by several [early-adopter projects](https://metacpan.org/requires/distribution/Alien-Base?sort=[[2,1]]).
* The documentation and tests are included
* Alien::Base::ModuleBuild can fetch, build and install libraries. By design they are localized to the current Perl installation
* The system is perlbrew/local::lib compatible and as a result does not require root privileges
* FTP and HTTP are supported, though both could use some polish, bundled binaries are also supported
* Library metadata is extracted from pkgconfig data or may be generated if needed
* Alien::GSL does NOT yet depend on Alien::Base, though a [branch](https://github.com/jberger/Alien-GSL/tree/base) on its github development site is ready to be uploaded to PAUSE once I deem Alien::Base fully stable.
## Thanks
I would especially like to that my ever-patient project coordinator Makoto Nozaki for his help coordinating the project, and for far longer than expected.
As the project progressed beyond its expected life, my Ph.D. Thesis and Defense took more and more of my time and so I want to thank both the Perl Foundation and the community at-large for being patient with me as well.
I also want to thank all of those people who have in any way encouraged or contributed to Alien::Base:
* Christian Walde (Mithaldu) for productive conversations about component interoperability
* kmx for writing Alien::Tidyp from which I drew many of my initial ideas
* David Mertens (run4flat) for productive conversations about implementation
* Mark Nunberg (mordy, mnunberg) for graciously teaching me about rpath and dynamic loading
* Torsten Raudssus (Getty) for productive conversations about usability
* giatorta, alexrj, jtpalmer, rsimoes, preaction for patches/pull-requests
* Any others I have forgotten
## Closing
This process has been taxing at times, but still rewarding.
I hope that Alien::Base will be a useful part of the CPAN toolchain in the future as the Perl renaissance progresses!
*Original article at [Joel Berger \[blogs.perl.org\]](http://blogs.perl.org/users/joel_berger/2013/05/alienbase-final-report.html).*
*The Grants Committee will evaluate this report and make decision on the grants payment. Feel free to give us your inputs at the comments field.*
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