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Re: Relocatable perl

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From:
Dan Sugalski
Date:
April 30, 2001 08:58
Subject:
Re: Relocatable perl
Message ID:
5.0.2.1.0.20010430115107.01ff0d98@24.8.96.48
At 04:42 PM 4/30/2001 +0100, Alan Burlison wrote:
>Solaris will have two new features that may make it possible to finally
>achieve the Holy Grail of a truly relocatable perl.

s/perl/perl on Unix/;

;-P (Not that I'd want to point out that we've been doing this on VMS for 
as long as I've been doing perl. That'd be crass. :)

>I suspect that to make this work I'd have to make all of those #defines into
>dynamic strings, and tweak them at startup.  Does this seem correct?  Where
>would I put them?  Globals?  This would only work if the above variables all
>had a common directory prefix - if someone decided for some reason to tell
>Configure they wanted SITELIB_EXP on a completely different filesystem there
>would be no common directory prefix to twiddle.

Globals sound like a good thing. Feels like there might be some sort of 
security issues there, but beats me what they might be.

>Is this really worth the effort?

Personally, I'd say *YES*! :) It's the single biggest annoyance I've got 
when building perls on Unix boxes. On my VMS systems I can build the things 
anywhere I want, install the modules I want, and then test to my heart's 
content. When I'm convinced things are proper I flip one switch and Things 
Magically Work on the new perl instead of the old one. More importantly, I 
can take the archive I have and move it to any of the production boxes I 
might want (regardless of their disk structure) and drop it in.

					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk


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