List::BinarySearch provides and installed the pure-Perl List::BinarySearch::PP. If a user has installed List::BinarySearch::XS, List::BinarySearch quietly benefits by upgrading to the XS versions of key components. This behavior may be overridden with an environment variable.
What I'm looking for is suggestions on how to cause an install of List::BinarySearch to attempt to download and install List::BinarySearch::XS (a separate distribution), but to gracefully fall back to the pure-Perl version provided by L::BS if the target system is unable to compile and get a clean test run from the XS module. So this would be a dependency that is automatically pulled in, but that won't cause a failure if it doesn't build out. I'm aware that the meta spec provides facilities that might help here, but not all of the CPAN installers support the spec to the degree necessary. I'm also trying to maintain backward compatibility with Perl 5.8. I'm looking for suggestions on how to require a module, but gracefully downgrade if the module can't be built, and how to do so in a way that will be compatible back to Perl 5.8. Dave -- David Oswald daosw...@gmail.com dav...@cpan.org
