I have made a small Applet containing a Perl script intended for use by folk
not necessarily conversant with Perl. The script is inside the applet bundle,
is called by AppleScript and works as intended.
Unfortunately the Perl script itself calls 'MacPerl::DoAppleScript' which
causes an error if the version of Perl is 5.10.0, which is the case of course
on 'Snow Leopard' machines. The problem can be resolved by setting
'Prefer-32-Bit' to 'Yes' in 'com.apple.versioner.perl.plist'. The question is
how to achieve this, bearing in mind some (possibly most) of the users will
be unused to Perl and terrified of using the Terminal.
I have resolved this difficulty for the moment by placing another Perl script
in the applet bundle which reads simply
if (qx(file /usr/bin/perl) =~ /executable x86_64/) {
qx(defaults write com.apple.versioner.perl Prefer-32-Bit -bool yes)
}
The notion behind this is that if the default version of the perl executable is
compiled for Intel 64 bit architecture it probably is 64 bit perl (?) and
Prefer-32-Bit should therefore be set to 'Yes'. This script is run before the
main Perl script is launched by which time 'com.apple.versioner.perl.plist'
will have been updated.
The first question is this. Is it acceptable to change the setting of
'com.apple.versioner.perl.plist' on someone else's machine? What if the owner
wants to use 64 bit Perl? It is not sensible to restore the setting of
Prefer-32-Bit to 'No' at the end of the run because the owner may have already
set it to 'Yes' anyway.
The second question is this. Is there a better way to resolve the problem of
how to contrive a portable Perl script incorporating a 'MacPerl::DoAppleScript
call?
Suggestions would be most welcome.
Alan Fry
