Excellent points. I think the Perl community does have its head in the sand about some of the realities facing acceptance of Perl in other computing environments, especially traditional IT or MIS departments. I know just enough about those places to know that it's a different world from the cozy UNIX environments I grew up in.

Separating the system perl... from the individual developers perl environments.

A lot of Open Source projects assume that either you have root access to the system yourself, or have really friendly administrators that will install whatever you want just for the asking. Neither is true for a lot of people out there.

I think it would help the more widespread acceptance of Perl (and other tools) if they supported real relocatable installation, beyond the ability to specify your own absolute path name at compilation time. The idea is for the tool to support a library and directory structure with relative paths, not absolute paths, so you can check in a verified copy of the tool and know that it's not pulling in any library or module from outside the source tree.

I haven't tried to concoct a version of Perl that does this, although I did try to create a similar version of GCC once. (It can be made to work, but requires a lot of really fragile symlinking and oddball configuration.) Perl allows you to rely on a specific tool version better than a lot of other systems by supporting side-by-side /usr/lib/perl5/$VERSION/ directory structures, but this still relies on coordinating with the sysadmins to install new versions and modules. I have this gut belief that using Perl in a traditional IT environment would be a lot simpler for all involved if it could be used without relying on installation outside of the source tree, but maybe I'm making this up.

Does any of this apply to the environment you're targetting?

In reply to RE: RE: why i may have to leave perl... by knight
in thread why i may have to leave perl... by eduardo

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