Charles Lane wrote:
> This doesn't do automatic searches for extensions (I've got a bit
> of DCL that *almost* does this, but you'd have to tell it what you
> *don't* want built). Instead it just changes the syntax of the
> extensions in $Config{extensions} from
> File::Glob to File/Glob
>
> Included is is a patch to CONFIGURE.COM, to SUBCONFIGURE.COM for
> the "canonical" BUILD_EXT.COM, and a patch to t/lib/glob-basic.t
> so that it'll won't give us a bogus error when (after the change
> above) it actually *does* run on VMS.
>
>
> --- configure.com-orig Fri Mar 3 23:55:23 2000
> +++ configure.com Fri Mar 3 23:48:24 2000
> @@ -1969,6 +1969,40 @@
> $ rp = "[''dflt'] "
This is great work Charles. But I wonder if this may be the wrong
approach. Isn't it nice to have "File::Glob" in `perl "=V:extensions"`?
So that if I want documentation I type:
perl "-V:extensions"
perldoc File::Glob
I get the doc for the perl package name I specified.
That is, perhaps we should convince the Unix perl folks that their
$Config{extensions} is wrong to use '/' in place of '::' and that perhaps
they ought to map it to '::'. Perhaps in the meantime we ought to do
something like this:
$ gdiff -u t/lib/glob-basic.t;1 t/lib/glob-basic.t
--- t/lib/glob-basic.t;1 Fri Mar 3 20:12:04 2000
+++ t/lib/glob-basic.t Mon Mar 6 09:38:36 2000
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@
chdir 't' if -d 't';
unshift @INC, '../lib';
require Config; import Config;
- if ($Config{'extensions'} !~ /\bFile\/Glob\b/i) {
+ if ($Config{'extensions'} !~ /\bFile(\/|::)Glob\b/i) {
print "1..0\n";
exit 0;
}
End of diff.
It will be the case that the MacPerl folks will eventually need to do
something about this as well (their directory separator is ":").
I am not too attached to either approach and I do realize that my reply to you
might have inspired you to take the approach you did. But I think that the
perl package hierarchy syntax is a good thing (tm). They argued to change it
to "::" from "'" in the perl 4 -> 5 transition, in part to appease emacs users.
It is somewhat ironic that VMS is one rare platform in that "::" means
something in a path specifier. Other languages such as C, C++, Java use "."
for struct/class hierarchy which is the path separator on VMS, but the period
is the string concatenator in perl.
What do you think about changing the regular expression?
Peter Prymmer
