Re: Apple Perl directory layout

[Sherm Pendley]

On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 02:38 PM, Michael Maibaum wrote:

As I guess most of you know, Apple's system Perl layout is broken

Please don't presume to speak for everyone here. What I *know* is that's it's different than the traditional layout. Whether or not it's "broken" is a matter of opinion, not a statement of fact.

, because it doesn't version the module directories and this means Perl upgrade trauma.

Upgrading Perl can be traumatic, but only if you choose to make it so. If that's what you choose to do, you're asking for headaches, and you shouldn't blame Apple when you get what you've asked for.

Personally, I think the default approach of organizing everything under /usr/local/lib/perl/ is bizarre. If you're a fan of it, try this exercise - spend a few years maintaining and updating multiple versions of Perl, installing them with the default layout. Then, see how long it takes you to identify and delete modules that are three or four revisions old. You'll be able to do it - but not without quite a bit of thought and some careful hand-pruning of subdirectories.

It's far saner to just install each version of Perl into its own directory - /usr/local/perl5.8.0 or whatever. With a minimum of thought and planning, it's trivially simple (and not the least bit traumatic) to keep as many different versions of Perl on your system as you need. And deleting an old version that's no longer used becomes a trivial matter of deleting the proper directory.

 Anyway, I just found out that Apple has no bugs on this

Because it's not a bug. Bugs are unintentional flaws; this was an intentional decision. You're free to disagree with it if you want, of course, but not everything you disagree with is a mistake.

I'd like to encourage people to file a bug on this, so when apple upgrades the system Perl to 5.8.x they will hopefully use a sane directory layout

And I'd like to encourage people not to file erroneous bug reports. If anything, file a feature request - but even that, in my opinion, is misguided. The directory layout that Apple has chosen for their system copy of Perl is perfectly reasonable.

What is *un*reasonable, in my opinion, is to expect Apple to ship an OS that continues to work perfectly in all respects when you replace a major component. What makes this all the more unreasonable is the fact that it's trivially simple to install a copy of Perl elsewhere, for your own use, while still allowing the OS and anything else that expects the default version to continue to use that.

sherm--

If you listen to a UNIX shell, can you hear the C?