On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 06:54:42PM +0000, Edward Avis wrote: > IMHO all this stuff with packlists and automatically appending to > perllocal.pod is a misdesign. It means you can't then uninstall > cleanly without a lot of cruft. Also on principle I feel that each file > should belong to one and only one package, there shouldn't be one file > which is modified by each package that comes along.
I honestly haven't given much thought to this, however... > The idea of having a log of what's installed where is a good one, but if > people want that they will surely use a package manager such as RPM, or > the equivalent for their OS (including ActiveState's PPM on Windows). > Having random files which change on install and uninstall makes it > harder to build such packages, and so works against the goal of making > it easy to keep track of what's there. ....I do think the basic idea is a good one. MakeMaker is (or has become) a packaging system. A CPAN tarball can be thought of as an srpm. A PPM is a binary rpm. How it goes about storing this install information, however, is entirely up in the air. This is all very old, very unmaintained areas of MakeMaker so its all open to discussion. > And (perhaps most importantly) these files add extra complication, which > MakeMaker could really do without. So if it were up to me I would get > rid of packlists and quietly ignore perllocal.pod. I don't know - are > these files mandated by perl5 itself or are they introduced by > MakeMaker? The fates of the two are forever intertwined. perllocal.pod and .packlist have to be there for basic backwards compatibility if nothing else. > (And what is the purpose of packlists anyway?) Dunno really. Ask Alan Burlison maybe? (ExtUtils::Packlist author). > The kludged-in uninstall will suffice for my project, but I'll leave it > on my todo list to implement it as an extension to MakeMaker. Ripping > out all the existing broken uninstall code will be an enjoyable > exercise, so I might do that even if I don't submit a patch for a new > implementation :-). There's an old series of Star Wars books (if I may indulge my cheesy reading habits) all about Han Solo & Chewbacca before they got involved with the Rebel Alliance. Its been rereleased as "The Han Solo Trilogy". In one book, Han and Chewie are so down on their luck that they have to fix the Falcon using shoddy hydraulic parts. Later on they finally get the proper parts and Chewbacca gleefully tears out the hydraulics, throwing each part away as violently as possible. That's what I feel like when I can find a bit of MakeMaker to rip out. -- Michael G. Schwern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/ Perl Quality Assurance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kwalitee Is Job One Ooops, fatal mutation in the test script.
