Limbic~Region has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

All,
The first few paragraphs are all background information. Feel free to skip to the last paragraph if you are only interested in the question being asked.

A couple of days ago, I got frustrated by not being able to write Perl6 at work. For reasons which are not pertinent to this post, I only have http/https connectivity to the outside world via a proxy and have no ability to "install" programs on my local machine. After obtaining a zipped copy of GHC, Subversion, and ActiveState Perl - I configured Subversion to use my proxy and checked out Pugs.

Here is where the real fun began. After running perl Makefile.PL I received a cryptic message about Perl not being installed in C:\TEMP and to install it in a standard directory. It took me the better part of two hours tracing through the Makefile and modules that called modules to find the source of the problem. It turns out that the Config module sticks some silly message in the hash about not being installed if Perl is not actually installed. Since it is a tied hash that makes it read only, the only option I had at this point was to modify the module and hard code the path to Perl - not elegant but effective.

The very next day on #perl, someone asked why CPAN.pm was complaining about Perl not being installed. I asked if it was complaining about not being able to find perl.h and the response was yes. I explained my kludge (to include the 124 character search & replace) and began wondering how better to solve the problem.

My first thought was to contact the Config author and explain the problem with using a zipped version of ActiveState Perl and suggest croaking with a more descriptive message when appropriate. The trouble is that it appears that it is in the Solaris-PerlGcc-1.3 bundle which seems very wrong to me. The Config module is specific to Perl (not a specific OS or compiler) and has been part of the core since 5.00307. The bundle has only been around since 2003-05-13. I think perhaps it has been accidently hi-jacked but POD doesn't list an author. What do you think I should do - attempt to contact the bundle author, a pumpking, nothing, or something else entirely?

Cheers - L~R

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Re: ActiveState and Config.pm Question
by dave_the_m (Monsignor) on Jul 01, 2005 at 13:29 UTC
    I don't really understand your issue. Config.pm is specific to perl, the OS, the hardware and the compiler - it is autogenerated when perl is built, and includes all the configuration parameters determined when that perl was built.

    Solaris-PerlGcc-1.3 is a red-herring: ignore it.

    Dave.

[reply]
      dave_the_m,
      The issue is that I would like to contact the maintainer of Config.pm about making a specific error message a bit more friendly. In trying to track that individual down I found that it belongs to a bundle not making any sense. Typically you will see a core module belonging to the Perl bundle for that distribution or individually belonging to an author between releases. Neither is the case here. So I assume your advice would be to contact a pumpking then?

      Cheers - L~R

      I added the word specific in my original post WRT OS and compiler to clarify things
[reply]
        It's part of the core, so use perlbug to file a report.

        Dave.

[reply]
      dave_the_m,
      Ok - I can see it now plain as day "it is autogenerated when perl is built". For some reason, my brain read that as "the blanks are filled in when perl is built but the template is already there" and not as "the module doesn't exist before the actual build process". This is an AS problem not a Config.pm issue. Thanks for your help even though your clue stick didn't appear to be working at first.

      Cheers - L~R

[reply]

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