Developer Information

Information on developing dfm.

dfm is written in perl

dfm is written in perl for a few reasons:

• perl 5.8.x (at least) is installed by default on every UNIX-like system.
• Perl is great at this sort of thing
• I use perl at my day job

Also, dfm doesn't use any modules other than those that ship with perl 5.8.x. This chief constraint means that dfm can run on any system without needing to first install dozens of modules. CPAN is a great resource for sharing reusable bundles of code, but not for this application. Having no other dependencies than what is core means that getting up and running on a new system requires two things: git and dfm.

Tests

Tests for dfm are in the t subdirectory. These are rather simple right now, but eventually they will test all dfm functionality.

It's OK to use CPAN modules in tests as it is understood that developing dfm usually only happens on one or two machines.