Peter da Silva wrote:
> If you're talking about an application in Perl, why would your installer
> not ALREADY be a Perl script? Why would anyone be building Makefiles and
> the like to install Perl scripts? That's not just confusing me, it
> sounds hateful and foolish.
It was a decision made long ago, but the reasoning goes something like this...
We need a build system that can do recursive dependencies and be quiescent
about already built parts of the system. make does that. Everybody knows how
to write Makefiles and you need make to build Perl so everybody already has
make installed! It would be a waste of time to reimplement what make already
does, so let's just write something to write a Makefile.
This is over 13 years ago when Perl only ran on Unix, and it made some sense
then. Now it's absurd, I agree. This is, after all, hates software.
--
Don't try the paranormal until you know what's normal.
-- "Lords and Ladies" by Terry Prachett
