At 03:57 PM 4/3/2002 -0500, Andy Dougherty wrote:
>On Wed, 3 Apr 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>> I wanted to point out that vmsperl's config.sh does not know
>> about _exe. It does know about exe_ext though. In looking
>> at Configure it would appear that _exe is a special executable
>> extension for use before .-ing a hints/$foo.sh file. Hence I suspect
>> that if your patch were to go in it would have been better to use
>> $Config{exe_ext} rather than $Config{_exe}.
>
>Actually, exe_ext is just an old synonym for _exe. Originally the
>variable was called exe_ext, but I thought that foo$_exe "looked better"
>and so changed it accordingly in metaconfig a long long long time ago.
>exe_ext and _exe should be identical, and it should suffice to only use
>_exe everywhere. I left exe_ext in only in case someone had a custom
>hints file that was not part of the core distribution, or in case another
>package using metaconfig had hints files that used exe_ext.
>
>Alas, people use Config{} variables without actually reading and
>understanding their definitions (which are included in Config.pm, and also
>in Porting/Glossary) so we're now stuck seeing both versions actively
>used. Sigh.
Um, the reason we we are stuck seeing both is that the preferred variable
changed out from under existing code. Also, the new version was not added
to the configuration process for all platforms, so only the older version
could really be depended on when attempting to write portable code. Look at
installperl in 5.003. It uses exe_ext pretty heavily and as far as I can
tell _exe was not on the horizon yet. 5.004 uses it in some of the
lib/ExtUtils modules, and again _exe is not yet anywhere to be found. A lot
more than some hypothetical custom hints file depended (and still depends)
on the existence of the older variable.
exe_ext (and friends lib_ext and obj_ext) have the advantage of matching the
MakeMaker macros of the same names and of being considerably more
descriptive than their hyper-cryptic replacements ("_a" would never ever
suggest to me that it has something to do with a library). But I suppose
the horse is long since out of the barn on this and we are stuck with the
shorter, less descriptive versions. So Peter's patch should be applied.
