Re: Try out a fink package for 5.6.1?

[Ken Williams]

Hi David,

Thanks for your feedback!

On Monday, February 10, 2003, at 07:17  PM, David R. Morrison wrote:

Hi Ken. I've been wanting to get some perl packages into Fink for some
time, and this looks like a great start. The package worked well for me,
although you do need to adjust where the man files are stored (Fink puts
them in /sw/share/man, not /sw/man);

Okay, I'll try to adjust that in the .info file. The perl installation location variables are always so non-fun...

I also noticed a little warning about
"make test" not having been run...

Yeah, tests are standard when installing most perl modules but not when installing most fink packages. I figured that it was faster to not run the tests, and several of them are known to fail, so I just didn't bother.

One of the problems with the current situation is that there are those
widely-followed instructions for replacing Apple's perl by a more recent
version, but doing that breaks tools (like Fink) which may depend on a
specific version. So it would be great to have a Fink way to install 5.6.1
and/or 5.8.0.

Yeah, there could certainly be a fink package made for 5.8.0 and it would work fine. Users could just adjust a /usr/bin/perl (and/or /sw/bin/perl) symlink to get the different versions, or just use the full paths.

I think this means that the version number needs to be part of the package name, though, and not just in the fink 'Version' field. Probably perl5.6 and perl5.8, similar to the fink packages apache and apache2, and the various versions of autoconf?

I guess the ideal setup would let people mix and match Fink and CPAN
installations of perl modules at will, but I'm not sure I understand a good
way to do that. I've been reading through some of the archives of this
list in an attempt to figure it out. (But I guess I've also been nervous
about direct CPAN installs because of the old problem of /usr/bin/head being
replaced by /usr/bin/HEAD on our wonderfully case-challenged HFS+
filesystem when CPAN was used to install libwww-perl, but perhaps that
problem has been solved by now.)

Not exactly. I still keep a /usr/bin/head.save around for this purpose. The issue seems to be that MakeMaker (or ExtUtils::Install) installs scripts to $Config{installscript}, and there is no $Config{installsitescript} entry to use.

Anyway, certainly if Fink itself is going to be used to compile some 5.6.1
or 5.8.0 modules, then /sw/lib/perl5/site_perl/ needs to be in @INC
(although perhaps only in Fink? by setting it in Fink's /sw/bin/init.(c)sh
perhaps?).

Hmm - mainly because of my preferences for my own machine, I'd like to keep the targetted location for regular (non-fink) CPAN installs /Library/Perl/ even when using the fink perl-5.6.1. /sw/lib/perl5/site_perl/ would be a good place for fink-installed modules, or 5.8.0 modules, though.

There are also interesting issues of whether, when Fink compiles a perl
module, it should be doing so under multiple versions of perl.  I'd
appreciate hearing your thoughts about that as well.

I was thinking maybe it should sense what perl versions are installed (by probing for fink packages) and just install for any & all installed perls, but I don't think that will actually work - what happens if the user installs perl-5.6.1, then DBI, then perl-5.8.0? DBI for 5.8.0 won't be installed. So that seems to point to using separate fink packages for the perl versions.

-Ken