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On Monday 01 March 2004 19:56, Nick Ing-Simmons wrote:
Tels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:Moin,
My problem with MakeMaker is that it has a very powerfull, but very sparse documented interface and it is not possible to find out by trial-and-error how it works and all the "magic" of MakeMake really hides things. That's good when it works, but when it fails it leaves you with no clue _why_ it fails. Granted, someone familiar with all the gcc/cc/ld stuff, 15+ years of Unix history, and a lot of experience can debug the problem, but everyone else is left in the dust.
Which is why "we" are developing
Module::Build
Which is supposed to be more perl-ish in its interactions.
The Module::Build code I have seen for SDL_Perl is at least as ugly as MakeMaker's internals, if not even more (and it seemed to need a lot more code than a simple Makefile.PL). And it doesn't (didn't) even work on windows! (Read: There it needs even more magic). There is no way I would have been able to come up with the Module::Build stuff - and apparently the other SDL people struggled also quite a bit.
Yeah, I recently got a peek at the SDL build code recently when helping crazyinsomniac with some problems on Win32. M::B could (and will eventually) do more to simplify scripting builds, but it needs more feedback from users as to what specifically can be done to improve it.
The intentions for Module::Build are good (use Perl for just copied a few pm files around), but I fear for compiling C stuff it will end up with the same amount of "tangle" under the hood than Makemaker.
M::B is still young. Much of the stuff related to managing pure perl modules is pretty mature, but the XS stuff needs to be exercised and expanded. Some of that is currently on the drawing board.
That was not critic on Module::Build or Makemaker, just general on the way we build/compile/link/use software today - even for very simple cases you end up with a nightmare of special cases. At least the platforms with only 8.3 filename support are finally dieing...
The Module::Build mailing-list is open to all: <http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/module-build-general> I'm sure Ken would appreciate any critique or suggestions offered.
Regards, Randy.
