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Postings from December 2013
# New Ticket Created by James E Keenan # Please include the string: [perl #120808] # in the subject line of all future correspondence about this issue. # <URL: https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=120808 > I posed this question on perl.perl5porters earlier this year and got no responses -- except one from rjbs asking me if I had received any responses and suggesting an RT if I had not. Hence, ... pod/perlsource.pod describes the 'ext/' directory in the Perl 5 distribution thus: ##### =item * F<ext/> This directory contains XS-using modules which are only released as part of the core. These modules generally have their F<Makefile.PL> and are laid out more like a typical CPAN module. ##### This is misleading because (as of my last count in May 2013), there are 35 subdirectories underneath ext/ of which only 28 have XS. The 7 subdirs which do *not* have XS are: Errno FileCache IPC-Open3 Pod-Functions Pod-Html Tie-Memoize Win32CORE My sense is that, until relatively recent times, 'ext/' always held modules with XS. That's certainly the simplest interpretation of the first sentence in the paragraph from perlsource.pod quoted above. Note that in the following paragraph in perlsource.pod, we have this: ##### =item * F<dist/> This directory is for dual-life modules where the blead source is canonical. Note that some modules in this directory may not yet have been released separately on CPAN. ##### It seems to me that the 7 non-XS using libraries under ext/ could just as easily be described as "not yet [having] been released separately on CPAN" -- which would mean that they would fit better under dist/ than ext/. If we can get a decision on what the layout should be, I will either: (a) revise the description of 'ext/' to de-emphasize the XS-using part of it; or (b) set about moving the 7 non-XS using modules to 'dist/'. Choose! Thank you very much. Jim Keenan Now, I could certainly live with a description of 'ext/' as holding libraries with a CPAN-style directory and file layout not maintained or distributed on CPAN. That wouldn't be a very elegant description, and it would sever the tie between 'ext' and 'eXternal Subroutine'. But it would be more accurate than what we have now. And this wouldn't require us to move any libraries from one of the subdirs to another.Thread Previous