add another linking level for perl5 binaries?

[Derek Lamb]

On Mar 28, 2013, at 2:13 PM, Lawrence Velázquez wrote:

> On Mar 28, 2013, at 2:17 PM, "Daniel J. Luke" <dluke at geeklair.net> wrote:
> 
>> indeed. I don't think a good solution here is to have a 'port select' for each and every perl module that might want to install something into $prefix/bin, though
> 
> For sure. I think the way Derek envisioned it, p5-foo would just choose its symlink target dynamically, depending on the active perl5 variant. This wouldn't be a reproducible setup though, so it's probably a no-go.

Why wouldn't that be reproducible?  If you know the active perl5 variant, shouldn't that be enough?

> 
>> (My preferred solution to this, and most of the other perl mess, would be to just have one perl version as 'the perl we provide' - but it appears that most other people don't agree).
> 
> +1. Then again, I don't use Perl at all :P
> 
> vq
> 

I'm starting to come around to that as well.  Perl is mostly good about backwards compatibility, but I have seen some notable exceptions lately, so I understand why others think differently.

Anyway, I think it _could_ work, but it sounds like a mess.  Probably easier to tell the user to either a) put the libexec/perl5.xy directory in their $PATH, or b) make their own symlinks in ~/bin or aliases in ~/.profile, or c) remember to type foo-5.xy when they want foo.

Derek