[enhancement] proposal - make all ports independent of which version of Perl is installed or the major one

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

OK - that clarifies what will go wrong in a way so that even I can
understand it ;-)

Lawrence Velázquez wrote:
> On May 17, 2012, at 7:25 p.m., Bjarne D Mathiesen wrote:
> 
>>> Your idea won't work right. If the path to an arbitrary perl is
>>> inserted into any of the files installed by the port, the build is no
>>> longer repeatable.
>>
>> But I'm *not* inserting an arbitrary value of Perl into any file.
>> At configure the variable will be evaluated and turned into a hard value
>> as far as I can tell.
> 
> The build would not be repeatable because it would depend on factors external to the given port -- namely, it would be dependent on whatever perl5 points to at the time you build. (Also, if you don't have perl5 installed at all, it will default to perl5.12 and install it if it's missing, even if you have perl5.14.)

How about if we just don't care that much about breaking this when
people switch to another major version of Perl ???

We must assume -some- intelligence on the part of people that install
Perl & ports that depend on Perl. We do that already in asking them to
configure some ports & moving files around. So how about a warning in
Perl5 that switching Perl5 version will break future re-builds of the
ports they have that depend on a version of Perl5 ??? & telling them
which ports will break upon re-building ???

Otherwise, I do think that we should focus on supporting just one single
version of Perl5. That discussion was brought up earlier in the thread.
For a summary see :
http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2012-May/019270.html

> 
>> As far as I can see, my proposal is no different from what's already
>> working in *all* p5- ports. Try eg :
>> less $(port file p5-acme-lolcat)
> 
> p5-acme-lolcat defines subports, each of which depends on a specific version of Perl. Having subports is not the same as doing a build with whatever Perl happens to be lying around.
> 

I really do think we need to find some kind of solution to this problem
with having Perl 5.12 hardcoded into 96 (the 92 my scipt finds in my
setup + the 4 I've personally converted) ports. Presently, it hinders
people in using any other version of Perl unless they are willing to do
what I've done : have a local repo with pathces with all of the troubles
that can lead to.

-- 
Bjarne D Mathiesen
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