>Perl 5.8, and all too many reports of mangling the system afterwards. Does
>there exist an unambiguous set of instructions which I cna follow to upgrade
>my existing Perl installation? If not, then what is the best way, and why is
Shortly after 10.2 is released, the Apple Internet Developer [1] site will
be releasing an article on installing Perl 5.8.0. I haven't tested the
article on 10.1, but they do go into some of the common problems that
people have mentioned on this list (as well as locations for installing
Perl). For all intents and purposes, the instructions *should* run without
modification on 10.1.
>If given the requested instructions for installing Perl 5.8, would those
>instructions need to be modified to make CPAN work properly? I would like
>to keep all installed modules in one place, namely /Library/Perl, is there
>any downside to that (considering this is a "home" system)?
The 5.8 article walkthrus some basic CPAN steps, so yes, CPAN works fine
under 5.8 without trickery. Perl 5.8.0, by default, installs all modules
into /Library/Perl, leaving /System/Library/Perl untouched and ignored.
There is an option to install into the current Apple structure though
(-Dprefix=/usr).
>up the existing, simple, useful way of doing things along with it.
>Specifically I'm referring to such things as the directory layout (where stuff
OS X has to cater to two hugely different crowds - the "been with the Mac
since 6.0 and I've been cackling at DOS the whole time" and the "been a
Linux user since before 300 baud". Linux is largely "DOS" to the Mac crowd.
As you know, a default install of OS X hides "DOS" - none of the BSD
directories are shown.
Taking Apache as an example - typical Apache home directories are
/home/httpd/, /usr/local/httpd, /usr/local/apache, etc - all directories
that are hidden to the "DOS" hating Mac user. There was probably a need to
switch those directories to /Library/Webserver/, else the concept of
"DocumentRoot" would be lost to a "DOS" hating Mac user ("What, you mean, I
have to use DOS to find where my web files are stored?! Bwahahahahah!").
Keeping DocumentRoot in the same place requires a whole new *world* of
knowledge, and it's simply not knowledge that a GUI loving Mac user would
ever give two turds about.
IMO, Apple has done the best it can to splice the two worlds together -
sure, the directories aren't the same for a CLI loving BSD user, but
neither is the non-buggy GUI for the Gnome/KDE user <g>.
(Note: these opinions are solely my own. Ugh.)
--
Morbus Iff ( united we're bland )
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
Tech: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 - articles and weblog
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