Craig A. Berry wrote:
> I believe what is causing this problem (and it's always been this way for
> DBI) is that Unix make utilities search for the 'all' target and build that
> first if no target is explicitly specified, whereas MMK and MMS build
> whatever target they encounter first in descrip.mms if no target is
> explicitly specified. In the case of DBI, this means that it attempts to
> build the Perl.xsi target before the requisite file copies, as Martin has
> noticed.
>
> The VMS version of MakeMaker as far as I can tell creates dependencies in
> the same order as they would be created under Unix, which seems like the
> right thing to do until you encounter a case like this. The obvious
> workaround is to explicitly specify the all target, but I wonder if we
> shouldn't play with MM_VMS.pm so that it puts additional dependencies at the
> end rather than the beginning. Anyone have an opinion on this?
Funny I had not noticed this distinction before. MMS is documented
in `HELP MMS` to behave that way. I would not object to a rework of
MM_VMS.pm, but in looking at the Makefile.PL for DBI I'd say
a quick alternative would be to patch it to warn folks to use the "all"
target (note the Win32 and HP-UX specific warnings in there for 1.13).
I had hoped to get a patch in to put C<WC "make='" + make + "'"> into
subconfigure.com so that $Config{make} will be helpful on VMS.
Peter Prymmer
