On Mon, Feb 12, 2001 at 01:03:31PM -0600, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
> The problem of unpacking, or in other words, installing, or in other
> words, embedded hardwired paths is hard. Think library paths: both
> pure Perl libraries *and* shared libraries.
True enough. The way Linux package managers work I think we can go with:
they rely on stuff being in well-known locations.
In the Linux case this is because the packager (in the broad sense of the
term) can rely on the target system's distro being "right" for the package.
In the case of Perl, we can rely on the parts inside the /usr/lib/perl (or
whatever) tree being set up the "right way", and die, or even do the wrong
thing, if the admin messed it up.
In other words, if there's a place for everything, we just have to put
everything in its place.
The one rub with that is manpages: they need to be installed in a
system-dependent location (with system-dependent names, even) in order for
the "man" command to pick them up. My best idea for this is to have some
directories (IE man dirs, but it could be useful for other things) have a
magical "install" script in them that knows how to do special things with
files in that directory (like set up symlinks from the normal man dirs).
BTW, this plan would make it painful to do with perl5 setups, since they
commonly have odd dir structures.
-=- James Mastros
--
"All I really want is somebody to curl up with and pretend the world is a
safe place."
AIM: theorbtwo homepage: http://www.rtweb.net/theorb/
