Ludovic Courtès <l...@gnu.org> writes: > Hi, > > Marius Bakke <mba...@fastmail.com> skribis: > >> Hi Guix, >> >> This patch disables installation of "perllocal.pod" files which records >> build time and not much else in perl packages. >> >> I haven't checked whether this is needed for packages using 'Build.PL', >> if you know any such package let me know. > > Are these perllocal.pod files really useless? > > In Debian this problem is filed as <https://bugs.debian.org/835815>. > Apparently upstream ended up using SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH: > > https://github.com/Perl-Toolchain-Gang/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/pull/279 > > Should we do that instead? Or are perllocal.pod pointless anyway?
As far as I can tell, they really are pointless. Makefiles generated by MakeMaker have a "pure_install" target that do not create them. From http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=ExtUtils%3A%3AMakeMaker: "make install per default writes some documentation of what has been done into the file $(INSTALLARCHLIB)/perllocal.pod. This feature can be bypassed by calling make pure_install." Here is a typical perllocal.pod: --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- =head2 Tue Oct 25 03:46:54 2016: C<Module> L<Eval::Closure|Eval::Closure> =over 4 =item * C<installed into: /gnu/store/8bqypkq60c72ndxfxi9g661r6rzby7iv-perl-eval-closure-0.14/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.24.0> =item * C<LINKTYPE: dynamic> =item * C<VERSION: 0.14> =item * C<EXE_FILES: > =back --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- They contain build date, FFI language, link type, version and a list of executables. As far as I can tell, this is used by "traditional" package managers such as CPAN, which appends information about all modules in a location to a single perllocal.pod file [0]. Since our modules are self-contained, they will not have any more utility than the above. [0]: http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html#How_installed_modules "Each time a module is installed on your system, it appends information like the following to a file called perllocal.pod which can be found in /usr/local/lib/perl5/version number/architecture/ or something akin to that"
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