Please see the Alien manpage for the manifesto of the Alien namespace.

In short 'Alien::SDL' can be used to detect and get configuration settings
from an installed SDL and related libraries. Based on your platform it
offers the possibility to download and install prebuilt binaries or to
build SDL & co. from source codes.

The important facts:

* * The module does not modify in any way the already existing SDL
installation on your system.

* * If you reinstall SDL libs on your system you do not need to
reinstall Alien::SDL (providing that you use the same directory for
the new installation).

* * The prebuild binaries and/or binaries built from sources are always
installed into perl module's 'share' directory.

* * If you use prebuild binaries and/or binaries built from sources
it happens that some of the dynamic libraries (*.so, *.dll) will not
automaticly loadable as they will be stored somewhere under perl module's
'share' directory. To handle this scenario Alien::SDL offers some special
functionality (see below).