develooper Front page | perl.perl5.porters | Postings from April 2001

Re: Relocatable perl

Thread Previous | Thread Next
From:
Andy Dougherty
Date:
April 30, 2001 09:15
Subject:
Re: Relocatable perl
Message ID:
Pine.SOL.4.10.10104301205070.12236-100000@maxwell.phys.lafayette.edu
On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, Alan Burlison wrote:

>  At first I just thought that the equivalent of setting
> PERL5LIB would do, but a bit of searching around uncovered the following
> #defines that refer to the perl install location, and that are used in the
> source:
> 
> 	ARCHLIB_EXP
> 	BIN_EXP
> 	PRIVLIB_EXP
> 	SITEARCH_EXP
> 	SITELIB_EXP
> 	SITELIB_STEM
> 	
> 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?

Yes, that seems right.  

> 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.

Putting things on different filesystems is a quite plausible installation
scenario, I would think.  For example, if the vendor supplies
/usr/lib/perl5, then it might be worthwhile to have the sitelib stuff
default to be in an area clearly outside the vendor's control, perhaps
under /usr/local/lib/perl5. (Debian Linux does this, for example.)

Other sysadmins might feel compelled to put the architecture-independent
stuff under /usr/share and the arch-dependent stuff elsewhere.

> Is this really worth the effort?

It's certainly often requested. :-).

-- 
    Andy Dougherty		doughera@lafayette.edu
    Dept. of Physics
    Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042


Thread Previous | Thread Next


nntp.perl.org: Perl Programming lists via nntp and http.
Comments to Ask Bjørn Hansen at ask@perl.org | Group listing | About