I'm not a regular viewer of perlmonks, but I was pointed to this thread, so I'll answer.

There are several reasons we don't have PREFIX support right now. The first thing to look at is right in the M::B docs.

Second, we *do* have a way to specify a root directory. In fact, we have *two* ways: install_base and destdir. destdir is more suitable for rpm/deb/etc. package maintainers, and install_base is more suitable for people who want to install to their home directory, or to /usr/local instead of /usr, or whatever.

Finally, about the "big design mistake no one wants to fix" suggestion, there's nothing about M::B's design in particular that would prevent us from adding PREFIX support - the only hard part is actually just in writing code that implements PREFIX's byzantine logic, which at this point is only implemented in MakeMaker itself and will take considerable effort to extract. But someone's attempting to do that right now, and Schwern's going over the patch to check for correctness.

I don't think I've ever said PREFIX support was too hard, though - it's certainly not harder than other things M::B already has. I've said it doesn't *work* very well, and it doesn't seem to make much sense to spend a lot of my effort implementing it when other things are waiting.

Maybe I actually need to follow perlmonks a little more closely; the amount of FUD about M::B that gets passed around here without people actually checking it is a little disheartening.

 -Ken