On Jul 15, 2014, at 2:57 AM, john.d...@compinia.de wrote: > On 15.07.2014 03:24, Jeremy Begg wrote: > >>> PS. Why can't a PRODUCT INSTALL of PERL leave an older installation >>> alone (ie. do not start deleting files in the directory tree), or at >>> least offer an OPTION to leave the old installation as is? >> >> I'm not sure, but I suspect it's a required by-product of the PCSI >> installation process. And somewhat annoying, too! >> >> Using a PCSI kit also has problems if you want to install Perl onto a >> cluster-common disk, which is not the boot disk, because you end up with >> PRODUCT SHOW PRODUCT listing the kit on one machine but not on the other(s). >> >> The kit itself is just a complete directory tree so perhaps a PRODUCT >> EXTRACT command would do the trick instead? >> > Of course that is one approach, but seeing that someone has gone to all the > trouble of 'packetizing' perl it is a shame. > Surely in the 'open source' space one is never sure whether one's open source > based application is going to work with a new version of, in this case perl, > especially if one has compiled additional modules. So it would make sense, to > let you switch environments, from old to new and back again. The way the PCSI > works for perl at the moment, has become a nugatory activity.
I was dismayed when I prepared the 5.20 kits to discover that it removed the 5.18 installation. I looked long and hard in the docs for a way to make that optional and never found anything. If someone knows of a way to do that with PCSI, please fill me in. Since the default install location has the version number in it, there is absolutely no reason a 5.18 installation and a 5.20 installation cannot happily coexist. One thing I haven't tried is re-installing 5.18 after installing 5.20. If someone wants to try that, please let us know how it goes. The difficulty here is that, for example, 5.18.2 really should remove 5.18.1 before installing because (by default) they go in the same directory, but 5.20.0 should not remove 5.18.x. The only way I can see to do that with PCSI is to include the version number in the product name, so the product name, instead of "PERL," would be "PERL518," "PERL520," etc. This is what HP has done with Java, where you have "JAVA150" and "JAVA60." I guess the earliest that could happen now would be for 5.22 next March. Of course there is no requirement to use the PCSI kits. People can build from source and install wherever they like. ________________________________________ Craig A. Berry mailto:craigbe...@mac.com "... getting out of a sonnet is much more difficult than getting in." Brad Leithauser
