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Postings from October 2003
Assume I want to maintain a private Perl library in ~/lib/perl, what specific flags do I have to specify? Some docs (e.g., CPANPLUS) say that I need to pass "LIB=~/lib/perl/lib INSTALLMAN1DIR=~/lib/perl/man/man1 INSTALLMAN3DIR=~/lib/perl/man/man3" to MakeMaker. Other docs (e.g., CPAN) suggest setting PREFIX. All these quitely assume that MakeMaker / make will be used for building. However, since Module::Build now seems to be gaining as the preferred way to build modules, the required settings change drastically: install_path=script=..., install_path=bin=..., install_path=bindoc=..., install_path=libdoc=..., and so on. Moreover, while MakeMaker translates a leading "~/" into the user's home directory, Build does not. Also, specifying both sets of settings causes MakeMaker to complain about INSTALL_PATH not being one of its recognized options. Not to mention that PREFIX has different semantics than the Module::Build settings. I think some rethinking of this mechanism is necessary. In particular, I think that the relevant tools (CPAN, CPANPLUS, MAkeMaker, Module::Build) should require only one single setting to specify a private library and then use this to infer the other settings. Something like Module::Build's install_base. Alternatively, CPAN and CPANPLUS can use this info to pass the correct settings to Module::Build, ExtUtils::MakeMaker and so on. Do you agree this would be a good idea? -- JohanThread Next