Perl error, once and for all

[Eric Hall]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 01:21:38PM -0800, Scott Haneda wrote:
> On Feb 25, 2009, at 7:03 AM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
> >On Feb 25, 2009, at 12:49 AM, Scott Haneda wrote:
> >>Sorry, I know this has been explained before,
> >
> >yes, very recently.
> 
> Can you point me to they "why", not just the solution, I want to  
> understand what is the problem?
> 
> >>bur I can not find the answer:
> >>
> >>DEBUG: Executing org.macports.activate (p5-mime-base64)
> >>--->  Activating p5-mime-base64 @3.07_0
> >>Error: Target org.macports.activate returned: Image error: /opt/ 
> >>local/share/man/man3/MIME::Base64.3pm.gz is being used by the  
> >>active perl5.8 port.  Please deactivate this port first, or use the  
> >>-f flag to force the activation.
> >
> >As the error says, you want to use -f to activate in this case.
> 
> That feels dirty to me, why not just -f all p5 installs then?  If that  
> is the real solution, why not have ports look for p5 and auto add the - 
> f?  I am sure this is a bad idea, but if this is the norm, users are  
> more or less going to do this anyway.  What are the risks?
> 
> >Really, the port should output a note letting you know that you need  
> >to do this (and/or we should just decide to order @INC like freebsd  
> >ports does so that we don't have to deal with it any more.).

	Yes, and this is going to happen... RSN.

	For some (if not all) of the p5-* ports that have recently
sprouted problems, its the man pages that are the issue, not the
modules themselves.  I haven't had a chance to look into what
can be done to avoid the man page collisions.
	Forcing the install with -f isn't the right solution.
It "works" as a band-aid for now, but its not a good thing.

> 
> 
> I think I just found the trac on this, and read it, it is ancient,  
> this seems a pretty good issue to solve.  Is there anything I can do  
> to move it along?

	Yup.  Figure out why this is happening for the man pages,
come up with a solid solution (or three), bounce it off the
port maintainer (and maybe this list), then provide patches for
the final solution.



		-eric