James Mastros wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 12, 2001 at 01:03:31PM -0600, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
> > The problem of unpacking, or in other words, installing, or in other
> > words, embedded hardwired paths is hard. Think library paths: both
> > pure Perl libraries *and* shared libraries.
> True enough. The way Linux package managers work I think we can go with:
> they rely on stuff being in well-known locations.
>
> In the Linux case this is because the packager (in the broad sense of the
> term) can rely on the target system's distro being "right" for the
package.
> In the case of Perl, we can rely on the parts inside the /usr/lib/perl (or
> whatever) tree being set up the "right way", and die, or even do the wrong
> thing, if the admin messed it up.
>
> In other words, if there's a place for everything, we just have to put
> everything in its place.
>
> The one rub with that is manpages: they need to be installed in a
> system-dependent location (with system-dependent names, even) in order for
> the "man" command to pick them up. My best idea for this is to have some
> directories (IE man dirs, but it could be useful for other things) have a
> magical "install" script in them that knows how to do special things with
> files in that directory (like set up symlinks from the normal man dirs).
>
That probably should be in Perl's Config.pm, since Perl itself will have to
install its own manpages. Perl should probably also include system-wide
shared libraries location, and other things of this kind.
I'd rather not have any kind of `script' that would be run on an
installation, to avoid the `Memoize' kind of bug (couldn't find the
reference), in which the install script had something like
# `rm -rf /`
# This line above could be uncommented
> BTW, this plan would make it painful to do with perl5 setups, since they
> commonly have odd dir structures.
>
This is something that should be redesigned for Perl 6. And I think this
discussion goes along with the one about `par', since these directory
structures exist mainly for installing extensions on them...
- Branden
