On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> At 02:26 PM 4/3/2001 -0700, Peter Prymmer wrote:
>
> >On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> >
> >> Personally I can't imagine a situation where I would install Perl on
> >> top of an existing installation,
>
> >A place where you might do that is on Unix
>
> Right, but I was responding to the suggestion that we do this by default on
> VMS. Thanks for the interesting commentary on how this works on various
> platforms. You really ought to write a book, "Cross-platform Perl in a
> Nutshell" or something like that.
I already did. Well actually mine were simply editorial comments in one
of the chapters of Tom Christiansen's B<Perl Cookbook>. I added a bunch
of cross-platform gunk and he eventually rejected it (it proved to be a
wise decision on Tom's part since the flow of the chapter was much
smoother without it and after some additional polishing of his). Tom then
posted the reject to p5p and Chris Nandor grabbed it and ran with it. It
is now known as perlport.pod.
P.S. I forgot to mention that Windows uses a clever hack: something like a
pre-alolocated char** array with large sizes so that no matter where you
put perl.exe (within reason) it has enough space to re-write @INC. I am
not sure where that code lies but there are some non-trivial .h and .c
files in the [.win32] directory.
> >> you burn up twice as much disk space
> >> as necessary if you use the build tree as an installed location.
>
> > `mms clean` is your friend.
>
> Even so, you seem to end up with a lot more stuff than if you install to a
> new location.
Indeed - it is not quite as slim as an `mms install` into a perl_root that
is not otherwise occupied.
> >Perhaps we ought to document that more
> >prominently in README.vms? Perhaps too we ought to give an example of a
> >_proper_ prefix setting in README.vms?
>
> Yes, yes :-).
Do you want to take a crack at it? I have to document UTF-EBCDIC for
OS/390 aka z/OS...(plus oodles of day job stuff).
> >How about if we set the default to a similar string to the build
> >directory:
> >
> > e.g. build e.g. dflt prefix
> > DKA100:[PERL-5_6_1] DKA100:[PERL_ROOT-5_6_1.]
> >
> >OK - so how about something like that?
>
>
> Yes, I like that.
OK - this definitely cannot go into 5.6.1, but possibly 5.7.1.
Peter Prymmer
