-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Michael G Schwern wrote:
>>IMHO all this stuff with packlists and automatically appending to >>perllocal.pod is a misdesign. >...I do think the basic idea is a good one. MakeMaker is (or has >become) a packaging system. A CPAN tarball can be thought of as an >srpm. Hmm, I thought about a CPAN tarball as being like a source tarball, which contains the means to build the package and a simple installation routine, but not a full-fledged package manager. Like the way that a C program would have a basic 'make install' but you'd need a spec file as well to build a real source package. >A PPM is a binary rpm. Yes. But does PPM actually use the packlist or perllocal.pod stuff? I think it has its own list of files, though I'd have to check. >How it goes about storing this install information, however, is >entirely up in the air. This is all very old, very unmaintained areas >of MakeMaker so its all open to discussion. We should decide what facilities are wanted. Probably some of: - - Install - - Uninstall - - Clean upgrade At the moment only 'install' is supported, uninstall does not work and has not worked for many years. So at present the packlist creation is completely futile AFAICT. If we did decide that uninstall was needed - so treating MakeMaker as a packaging system in its own right - then what would be needed to implement that? The current packlist files are not enough, surely, since they're just a list of filenames and don't even give directory names. I'm not saying that uninstall or sophisticated packaging is something to be ruled out, I'm just saying that whatever choice is made, the existing packlist system is not helping. As a first step we could get rid of packlists. Perhaps I am ignorant and there really is a useful reason to create and update these files, perhaps someone older and wiser will explain it. But I can't see anything immediately. >perllocal.pod and .packlist have to be there for basic backwards >compatibility if nothing else. perllocal.pod I can accept, there may be some users who like to get a list of installed packages with 'man perllocal'. And it is part of perl5 so should be kept up to date. But what is the backwards compatibility reason for packlists? >>(And what is the purpose of packlists anyway?) > >Dunno really. In which case, surely... >Ask Alan Burlison maybe? (ExtUtils::Packlist author). Maybe he reads this list. - -- Ed Avis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Finger for PGP key -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8hz+LIMp73jhGogoRAnPIAJ4yXKCsX3KNJjFjCYE73yNSRy5/HwCeK8DP teUibXYD4JyZIP6a1KZ2Y9c= =ru46 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
