Subject: Re: Perl pkg on OS-X
To: Martin J. Laubach <mjl@maschndrohtzaun.emsi.priv.at>
From: Alistair Crooks <agc@pkgsrc.org>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 01/09/2002 17:29:01
On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 01:25:10PM +0000, Martin J. Laubach wrote:
>   I took advantage of accidentally destroying my NetBSD partition
> to do a Mac OS-X install on my G4. With the help of agc's bootstrap
> bundle, I got pkgsrc to work.

Good news, well done!
 
>   Now OS-X comes with perl pre-installed (and our perl pkg fails
> building), so I thought about adding a darwin-perl pkg that would
> register as "perl" as a placebo so one can install random p5-foo
> packages.

I'd prefer it if we could just build the perl package on OS X. This
is probably for the same reason that I prefer having perl in pkgsrc
rather than in basesrc, in so much as it's easier to upgrade Perl
if it's a package. (This may change with the advent of syspkgs).
All of our current perl utilities and add-ons in pkgsrc assume that
we're using perl from pkgsrc, and so some workaround which points
/usr/pkg/bin/perl5 at /usr/bin/perl may produce funnies at a later
date, if ever Perl ceases to be completely backwards compatible.
[Yes! I managed to keep a straight face as I wrote that]

I think it would be to everyone's benefit if we could fix broken
packages as we went along.

Regards,
Alistair