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
