Peter Prymmer wrote:
>
> We are open to suggestions about how to re-write any of this. One might
> imagine doing:
>
> $ IF F$TRNLNM("PERL_ROOT") .NES. "" THEN dflt = F$TRNLNM("PERL_ROOT")
>
> however, that could lead to trouble if you did not do:
>
> $ delete perl_root:[000000...]*.*;*
>
> before your `mms install` step (the scenario I have in mind is picking
> up an older version of a module that gets installed on the later version
> of perl on VMS in a place where the @INC array sees the prior version
> before the later version).
This is always a risk in Unix environs as well; I would prefer to not
nuke my perl_root if I am building binary compatible modules. I also
hate to reinstall all of my modules when I reinstall Perl. The Unix
install does warn about where site_perl is now located.
My vote would be to take the existing PERL_ROOT logical as the default
installation target then issue warnings about what needs to be checked,
as you offered above. A note in README.VMS about dropping the
PERL_ROOT logical before running CONFIGURE.COM would be great for the
users who need something different. DWIM should be followed for the
core as much as it is for the modules, IMHO.
Since Perl doesn't take well (in general) to being moved about after
being built, it really makes little sense to install in the current
build directory in any case. Anyone who is planning on having two
installations of Perl in parallel has to know what they are doing in
any case, so that would not be much of a suprise to them.
>
> The current way of setting the default $prefix value is based on the older
> notion that there was no installperl script that worked on VMS. One might
> argue that setting perl_root to some place in SYS$LIBRARY would be the
> proper "dflt" for VMS, although anyone who wanted to install perl without
> write access to SYS$LIBRARY would then be forced to specify
> "-Dprefix=MY:[PRIVATE_INSTALL.]" and they currently do not have to do so
> (if you were able to unpack the tar ball then you at least have write
> access to the build location).
>
> Peter Prymmer
I sadly do not have enough drive space available to put Perl in
SYS$LIBRARY in any case. :~(
Thanks
John Peacock
