How to make "dzil test" pass command line arguments to Makefile.PL?

Question

For one of my XS based Perl modules that depends on a C library, I use Dist::Zilla together with with the MakeMaker::Awesome plugin to create my Makefile.PL.

In order to pass options to Makefile.PL (especially INC and LIBS), I used to set the PERL_MM_OPT environment variable which worked fine so far.

Now I want to use Devel::CheckLib to check for the presence of the C library. Devel::CheckLib also supports INC and LIBS when supplied via the command line, but it doesn't read these options from PERL_MM_OPT.

How can I make dzil test pass command line arguments to Makefile.PL?

From a quick look at the source of the MakeMaker::Runner plugin this doesn't seem to be supported. Is there another work-around?

Answer 1

Passing arguments to Makefile.PL simply isn't supported by dzil and probably will never be. As a work-around, I add the contents of PERL_MM_OPT to a local copy of @ARGV before calling into Devel::CheckLib:

{
    local @ARGV;
    unshift(@ARGV, ExtUtils::MakeMaker::_shellwords($ENV{PERL_MM_OPT} || ''));
    check_lib_or_exit(...);
}

Ugly, but works.