At times we must make do with what we have: I'm working with a team of C++ programmers. To provide Perl access to their code they are using SWIG, which produces a .pm and a (big fat) .so file. The question is how to turn this into a distribution that can be installed in the correct place.
Target platform is all the same so no real concern about portability at this time (famous last words). We can just copy into @INC I suppose, although the plan is to use cpan2rpm so really would like a distribution (with a Makefile.PL). I've always used XS before that builds a "real" distribution where the .xs is compiled and linked at build time and MakeMaker figures out where to install. But, that's just not what I have, unfortunately. To get by could I just make a normal distribution and add in the .so file into the lib directory? Then let MakeMaker install? That seems ugly (not to mention platform dependent). Any other suggestions how to package up these so they can be installed in a normal "make install" for a stop-gap measure for now? My suggestion is to move to autoconf to build libraries and use thin XS wrappers, but that's a bigger project than anyone is willing to take on right now. BTW -- poking around Google there seems to be debate about SWIG vs. XS (and Inline), and often it seems like SWIG is preferred. Hard to believe since it makes such odd code with werid naming (use "foo"; $foo = foo::Foo->new) and sub TIEHASH. -- Bill Moseley mose...@hank.org
