On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 6:50 PM, Jan Dubois <j...@activestate.com> wrote:
> Mostly I would prohibit sharing of directories between Perl installations,
> and even within a single installation, the sharing of directories between
> install locations.
>
> E.g. the default configuration right now has $Config{installbin} and
> $Config{installsitebin} pointing to the the same directory. This means that
> if you install ExtUtils::ParseXS from CPAN, you end up with the new version
> of the module in $Config{installsitelib}, but the xsubpp script installed
> into $Config{installsitebin} will overwrite the core version already in
> $Config{installbin} because they are the same directory.
>
> This means it is now impossible to remove the ExtUtils::ParseXS module from
> the "site" install location and reverting to the core version.
>
> Even if you don't care about "delete" functionality in your package manager,
> you may still want to preserve the integrity of core install. Otherwise it
> is possible that the package manager updates a package it relies upon itself
> that breaks the package manager. Then it is impossible to fix this situation
> for a regular user without doing a complete reinstall of Perl itself.
>
> For this reason the ActivePerl package manager explicitly removes the "site"
> directories from @INC and only uses the modules originally included in the
> distribution.I think that would clash with most vendor distributed perls (or at least it does with both Debian and Red Hat). It would be nice if this system was instead able to integrate with them instead of them nuking it to prevent users from doing something stupid. Leon
