changing default perl

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Nov 11, 2013, at 11:32 AM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
>> It would certainly be possible to have some local metadata that our cpanm could consult to do any of the above, though.
> 
> This sounds like inventing a second language to do what we can already do in portfiles.

I guess it could be implemented that way, but it's not really what I was thinking.

> I like Jeremy’s idea of adding a portfile only if necessary to fix issues (add patches, etc.).

that would probably work.

>> The main benefit would be that /all/ of the modules would be available in a MacPorts supported way and they would be up-to-date without an army of volunteers building cookie-cutter portfiles for them.
> 
> And that would be great!
> 
> If we do this, we should find a way to make it abstract so that we can integrate other package managers besides CPAN. For example we have the same problem for php’s PEAR package manager: two years ago, Bradley put all of PEAR in MacPorts, but it hasn’t been updated since then. Perhaps this functionality could still be implemented as portgroups, or at least as tcl files in the _resources directory, so that new MacPorts base releases are not needed to make changes there.

I don't really know how other languages do this (and I'm no php expert). I'm at least somewhat leery of trying to design the most generic solution for this too (I would much rather make something that works and extend it if it seems reasonable to do so).

I think we require base/ changes if only because there won't necessarily be a portfile for each perl module yet there are going to be ports that depend on some of these modules (so we would need a way to handle that).

also - having to create releases to add functionality really shouldn't be something that we try to hack around by pushing code some other way. Does our release process need some attention to make it easier to do?

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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