Maybe you can write multiple Build.PL and MANIFEST files (e.g. Build.PL.p1, MANIFEST.p1, Build.PL.p2, MANIFEST.p2, etc.), one for each package you want to produce, and write a script to copy these to the standard names before building each package. The MANIFEST can include only the files you want in the package.

Update: Here is a very crude script which demonstrates my suggestion.

Thanks for the concrete example!

I'm thinking though it might be easier to link the codebase lib directory into the build directory rather than the other way around, e.g.

#error checking, use... omitted
#may have typos - read as perl-ish pseudocode

my @buildirs = ("foo1", "foo2");
my $repo="myrepo"; 
my $startdir=File::Spec::curdir();

foreach my $buildme (@buildirs) {
   chdir($buildme); 
   symlink($repo, "lib");
   system("perl Build.PL");
   unlink("lib");
}
chdir($startdir);
[download]

The advantage of this approach is that I don't have to have to make assumptions about the support files used by the build process, e.g. is there a MANIFEST.SKIP? is there a special subclass of Module::Build that needs other kinds of support files?, etc, etc.

The main disadvantage of any linking approach is that it isn't well behaved on MS-Win platforms. Although I do most of my development on Linux, there are situations when I need to work on MS machines. Cygwin/Vista has a particularly nasty bug where un-linking a symbolic link defined in Vista via anything using cygwin libraries not only removes the link, but also the underlying file or directory!

beth

Thank-you for taking the time to consider my question, but it isn't quite what I am looking for. My question concerns the process used to create what is uploaded to CPAN, not its final form.

As for the final form: A bundle isn't really necessary in this case. Once the tarballs are constructed and uploaded to CPAN, it is pretty easy to insure that downloading an extension tarball triggers the downloading of the core package. Each CPAN package merely needs to declare the core package as a prerequisite. Once that is done, any user who instructs CPAN/CPAN-PLUS to follow all prerequisites will automatically download the core module along with the desired extensions.

beth

My question concerns the process used to create what is uploaded to CPAN, not its final form.
Could have fooled me :) Maybe this

% cd one-dist
% perl Build.PL
% perl build dist
% cpan-upload -verbose one-dist-0.1.tar.gz
% cd ..
% cd two-dist
% perl Build.PL
% perl build dist
% cpan-upload -verbose two-dist-0.1.tar.gz
[download]

if thats not it, maybe you can explain better what you're asking :)