Broken perl configuration

Jan Stary hans at stare.cz
Sat Feb 23 11:49:16 PST 2013


On Feb 21 11:05:23, dluke at geeklair.net wrote:
> On Feb 21, 2013, at 10:05 AM, Bruce Miller <bruce.miller at nist.gov> wrote:
> > With MacPort's perl 5.12, the executable is installed in
> >  /opt/local/libexec/perl5.12/sitebin
> > which is *NOT* where people expect to find programs.
> > And it's NOT a directory people want to maintain in
> > their $PATH.
> 
> why? Why would people care whether they have /opt/local/bin or /opt/local/libexec/perl5.12/sitebin or /my/nonstandard/macports/prefix/bin in their $PATH?

People will care that they
(1) have to tweak their PATH at all
(2) have to pollute with /opt/local/libexec/version-du-jour-123
and keep an eye on what the exact verion is this week.

> > The reason for the configuration change
> > is to achieve the noble goal of being able
> > to install multiple versions of Perl, and
> > multiple versions of software running under
> > those Perls.  

Please excuse my Perl ignorance - what would be
a realistic scenario for having multiple versions
of Perl installed, and multiple version of Perl
software on top of those?

I can imagine a Perl developer might want this,
but that hardly justifies forcing the majority
(I believe) of users who just want to have one Perl
and one p5-foo on their system, without having to tweak
their configuration to be able to run it.

> As an aside, I personally don't feel that the benefits of
> having multiple perl versions available is worth it
> - I think we would be better served by just pushing
> the current stable perl...

I agree.

	Jan



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