Rafael Garcia-Suarez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >Michael G Schwern wrote: >> The major reason I've been avoiding putting any XS tests into MakeMaker >> is being able to reliably determine if the user has a working compiler >> and what that compiler is. Perl has it easy, the user obviously has a >> C compiler, the one they're using to compile perl! > >That's of course an easy assumption, but it's not true, esp. if you >use most commercial unixes, which ship with perl but without a compiler >by default.
I think you are agreeing with Michael! His point that when building _perl_ it is appropriate to build an XS test as we know we have the compiler we are building perl with. However, for MakeMaker in the wild as you point out the compiler may not be present. So install of MakerMaker cannot always pass XS building tests. However, if someone is trying to build an XS extension they had better have a compiler. So MakeMaker could have code to probe for compiler and find one that works and then pass that on to XS rules for C, C++. If it can't find one then process can fail at Makefile.PL time
