Vector: "Joining the Perl 6 Ecosystem"

After my comment yesterday about setting up a webpage pointing to the active projects coded in Perl 6 out there, the #perl6 channel reminded me about masak's proto. It is an attempt to create a simple CPAN-like tool for Perl 6. I had read about it months ago, run into some sort of difficulty using it, and just forgotten about it. But work has progressed, and masak and a few others are working on making it more powerful actively.

I've decided to try to get Vector on there, and document what I'm doing as I do it. Not that I think Vector is particularly brilliant, or that it should go in the Perl 6 CPAN when there is such a thing. But I hope it is at least both a pretty good example of how to do this sort of thing in Perl 6, and potentially a useful tool someone else could build on.

So I'm looking in the proto PIONEER file. It lists four conventions that need to be followed, the first of which is creating a deps.proto file. Vector doesn't have any dependencies; I'm not sure if having an empty file or no file is a better way of indicating that. I'm guessing an empty file, as that suggests that I have at least considered it. (Or better yet, with a comment indicating there are no dependencies?)

Next is building. Vector doesn't need a build stage, and PIONEER indicates that if there is no Makefile.PL or Configure.pl file, it just assumes the build worked, which sounds perfect for my purposes.

Step three is running tests. If there is a makefile, proto will make test. If there isn't, it will try to run prove recursively on the t/ directory. Assuming it's smart enough to run prove with the system's working Rakudo, this should work just fine with what we already have. Errr, assuming the LIB paths are set up properly.

Which is the last issue, I guess. I've just been running with Vector.pm and Test.pm in the top-level Vector directory, no need for a PERL6LIB environment variable. Will prove test figure out the paths automatically? And if I switch over to that system, should it be lib/Vector.pm or lib/Math/Vector.pm or something like that?

I think my next step is to check in what I've got now, make this post, e-mail a link to it to masak to get his comments, and head off to the pub. I will report on what happens later.