On Wed, 15 Jan 2003 Ken Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I've been tweaking a perl package for fink over the past couple of 
> days.  Unlike my previous efforts, this one installs as /sw/bin/perl 
> and doesn't overwrite anything Apple installs.  Its core libraries are 
> at /sw/lib/perl5/.  It also uses /Library/Perl/ as its site_perl, which 
> I figured would be convenient since many people may already have a 
> bunch of stuff installed there.  I could also add something like 
> /sw/lib/perl5/site_perl/ to @INC if people wanted it.

Hi Ken.  I've been wanting to get some perl packages into Fink for some
time, and this looks like a great start.  The package worked well for me,
although you do need to adjust where the man files are stored (Fink puts
them in /sw/share/man, not /sw/man); I also noticed a little warning about
"make test" not having been run...

One of the problems with the current situation is that there are those
widely-followed instructions for replacing Apple's perl by a more recent
version, but doing that breaks tools (like Fink) which may depend on a
specific version.  So it would be great to have a Fink way to install 5.6.1
and/or 5.8.0.

I guess the ideal setup would let people mix and match Fink and CPAN
installations of perl modules at will, but I'm not sure I understand a good
way to do that.  I've been reading through some of the archives of this
list in an attempt to figure it out.  (But I guess I've also been nervous
about direct CPAN installs because of the old problem of /usr/bin/head being
replaced by /usr/bin/HEAD on our wonderfully case-challenged HFS+
filesystem when CPAN was used to install libwww-perl, but perhaps that
problem has been solved by now.)

Anyway, certainly if Fink itself is going to be used to compile some 5.6.1
or 5.8.0 modules, then /sw/lib/perl5/site_perl/ needs to be in @INC
(although perhaps only in Fink? by setting it in Fink's /sw/bin/init.(c)sh
perhaps?). 

There are also interesting issues of whether, when Fink compiles a perl
module, it should be doing so under multiple versions of perl.  I'd
appreciate hearing your thoughts about that as well.

  Best regards,
  Dave Morrison

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