At 11:54 PM -0800 12/16/02, Wilfredo Sánchez wrote:
As pointed out here, if Apple upgrades perl, you have probably to upgrade XS modules. But what I was thinking was that there might be an application which embeds perl and therefore links against the perl library. A new system update with a new perl may require that application to relink as well, if it uses API that changed in perl. However, if the API was compatible, the app could continue to work. This will never work, however, if the perl library moved location, as that will cause a linker failure at runtime. So my theory was that breaking less often would be a good thing.
It's important to note that the directory structure was *not* meant to deal with this sort of problem. What it was meant for was to provide the ability to have multiple versions of perl installed simultaneously as a means of preventing breakage. Once you linked against, say, 5.6.0, you just kept 5.6.0 around, rather than trusting that 5.6.1 (or 5.8.0) behaved the same as the version you were replacing.
Perl didn't really have embedding in mind when that dir structure was set--it's more targeted at extensions, and the assumption has always been that embedders link against an explicit versioned libperl library. We're going to fix this for perl 6... ;) -- Dan --------------------------------------"it's like this"------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai [EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunk