Christoph Badura <bad@ora.de> wrote:
> dean@huxley.org (Dean Huxley) writes:
> 
> >Would it be possible to make the USE_PERL5 tests smart enough to see that
> >a version of perl5 already exists on the system even though it's not
> >5.004_04 or even though it was not installed with the pkg system?
> 
> In general it is not a good idea for packages to find and depend on random
> crap installed on a system.

In a way, I could take this same argument and say USE_PERL5 is doing that 
right now. ;-)

> You're probably better of making yourself an updated perl pkg and hack
> bsd.pkg.mk to use/depend on that instead of the supplied perl.

So anyone who wants to run the latest version of perl should do this?

If they already have it installed without using the package system
they'll have to reinstall with a their own package so things show up
with pkg_info.  Then they have to modify bsd.pkg.mk and remember not
to overwrite it the next time they get pkgsrc.tar.gz, but then they
might have to merge in changes.  

Of course, if they don't know to do all this, the default behaviour
of a pkg with USE_PERL5=yes is to overwrite the version of perl
already installed on the system, even if it is newer than the pkg'd
one.

I don't see this as an desirable solution...