Greetings,
I have been trying to patch MakeMaker as ships with recent
maint snapshots to accomodate some of Michael Schwern's
recent suggestions. It has been difficult to do since one of
the problems that arises on VMS is test failures only seen
under "mmk test". Along the way I realized that the s/miniperl/perl/
substitution seems as though it ought to cause trouble
elsewhere. Indeed it now appears that on any platform
it is now not possible to install perl into a path that has
the substring "miniperl" along it. So for example on
VMS you cannot install perl into DKA200:[MINIPERL...]
on Windows you may not be able to install perl
into C:\path\miniperl\place.
Here on Linux I can illustrate the problem fairly succinctly
showing some shell commands that I used to install
a copy of perl 5.8.x that was rsynced to .patch level 21138:
mkdir -p /home/pprymmer/miniperl/path/bin
mkdir -p /home/pprymmer/miniperl/path/lib
mkdir -p /home/pprymmer/miniperl/path/man/man1
mkdir -p /home/pprymmer/miniperl/path/man/man3
sh Configure -Dprefix=/home/pprymmer/miniperl/path -des
make
make test > test.out
tail test.out
t/pod/special_seqs...................ok
t/x2p/s2p............................ok
All tests successful.
u=2.4 s=0.98 cu=195.26 cs=20.3 scripts=765 tests=76865
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/pprymmer/perl_21138/perl'
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/pprymmer/perl_21138/perl'
make install
cd $HOME/cpan_modules/Text-CSV_XS-0.23
/home/pprymmer/miniperl/path/bin/perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
PERL_DL_NONLAZY=1 /home/pprymmer/perl/path/bin/perl
"-MExtUtils::Command::MM" "-e" "test_harness(0, 'blib/lib', 'blib/arch')"
t/*.t
/bin/sh: line 1: /home/pprymmer/perl/path/bin/perl: No such file or
directory
make: *** [test_dynamic] Error 127
So targets that rely on the FULLPERL macro
including 'test' and the various 'clean' targets
cannot be run now. A possible fix might be
to include some PERL_CORE magic in
the lib/ExtUtils/MM_Unix.pm::ini_PERL()
routine. Alas I do not have a patch to
address the problem as of yet since I
wanted to address the VMS specific
problem. One might consider adding a note
to the INSTALL file that mentions "do not
configure with a prefix that contains 'miniperl' as
a substring" or somesuch.
Peter Prymmer
