On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 09:21:12PM +0000, Eric Hall wrote: > There are valid reasons to have multiple versions of perl > installed at the same time - the least of which is testing new > versions to make sure they work while still being able to build > and run things against older versions.
I don't doubt that there are some benefits to supporting multiple simultaneous perl installations. But doing so imposes a substantial burden on maintainers of ports that use perl, in terms of maintainability and reliability: they need to be careful about which version of perl they're depending on and invoking, and non-default configurations probably aren't tested often. In fact, what we have now may be the worst possible world: we claim to support multiple perl versions, and ports have to go to some effort to specify which version they depend on, but it doesn't even work -- the p5.x- perl module ports conflict with each other! To give a few examples of the sort of problems this causes: - gnucash depends on p5.12-finance-quote (and its many dependencies). But autoconf detects that /opt/local/bin/perl is available, and so some of its scripts (e.g. gnc-fq-check) use that. This won't work right if perl5 +perl5_14 is installed. - even the scripts installed by the perl5.x ports themselves have this problem. For example, on my system, `cpan-5.14` invokes perl 5.12. That seems unexpected. - intltool depends on various p5.12 modules. Unfortunately, most packages using intltool try to invoke it using /opt/local/bin/perl, causing it to fail if that's not perl5.12. See, for example, #32425. Unfortunately, this needs to be fixed by setting INTLTOOL_PERL in every port that *uses* intltool. Most of the ~200 such ports don't do this. It isn't that any of these problems, individually, are particularly hard to solve -- but they seem sufficiently widespread that it makes me question whether supporting multiple perl versions is worth it. I can't think of any other distribution that tries to do this. Dan -- Dan R. K. Ports MIT CSAIL http://drkp.net/ _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-dev