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Re: Cross platform coding advice

by schweini (Friar)
on Oct 09, 2005 at 00:09 UTC ( [id://498476]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Cross platform coding advice

i'd just like to add that the shebang line ( #!/usr/bin/perl ) was always a source of majot headaches for me, when i developed on apache on windows, and deployed to apache on linux. a simple solution is to create the directoy c:\usr\bin\ and simply copy perl.exe into it (or create /perl/bin/perl on the linux machine, and put a symlink to /usr/bin/perl there).
this avoids the trouble of changing the shebang every time you transfer something from OS to OS.
the 'newline problem' is easily worked around by adding a '--' to the sheband line:
#/usr/bin/perl --
which tells the perl interpreter that everything after the '--' is code, and not some weird command-line options. You shouldn't REALLY need to do that as long as you always FTP your files in ASCII mode, but sooner or later some FTP program will mess this up, and with the '--' you can edit the files on a samba share, and everyhting works.
hope that helped,
-schweini

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Re^2: Cross platform coding advice
by Tanktalus (Canon) on Oct 09, 2005 at 01:34 UTC

    Just as a side note, but the first line is something that I'm trying very hard to always build into the script. That is, I would rather set up via Makefile.PL or Build.PL, and let them set the shebang line up appropriately. I admit to not working out all the kinks to the point where I can do this all the time, but it may be something to think about.

    One of the advantages is that you start thinking of your application as something to be distributed. You also will end up in an environment where a source-code control system (SCCS) and/or version control system (VCS) will make sense, and will be easy to use. Of course, on Linux, cvs fulfills that easily since it's usually built-in. On Windows, cvs is supposedly easy to set up (SourceForge has instructions on how to do this when accessing their cvs servers).

    Another advantage is simply that you end up with a "make dist" or "./Build dist" command that wraps everything up for you.

      point taken - although the particular software i am developing gets distributed via rsync to the other servers.
      speaking of CVS - is there a transparent filesystem-to-cvs thingy somewhere out there? i have gotten very used to my 'CTRL+S, perl -c, FTP, firefox-refresh, cp to production-code-dir' devel-cycle, yet would love to have versioning and all that, and some kind of CSV-filesystem-driver for windows and for linux would be great for that, i think...

        What I do for one of my projects is develop on my local webserver, cvs checkin, and then ssh to the server and run /srv/cvs/project/CVS/install_server - which in turn checks the current user, runs itself under sudo (which is set up to allow any user to run this script as a particular non-root user without a password), and then extracts itself to the real webserver using a cvs update command.

        An alternative is to make dist (or ./Build dist), and have some sort of private (and properly authenticated/authorised) page where you can just upload the distribution as a tar.gz file, and the CGI script can take it, uncompress it, unarchive it, build && build test && build install it, possibly followed by an rsync.

        Basically, pretty much every step you're doing to get it into production (or into test, for that matter) should be automatable down to a single command. Generally speaking, I find this type of extra work to set up completely invaluable. Think "Lazy". Lots of work so you can be lazy. I started doing this type of thing not because I'm lazy, but because I'm error-prone. I hated typing in things and getting them wrong. But, if I taught the computer how to do my work for me, it was less likely to screw it up - once I successfully taught it in the first place.

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