in reply to Re^9: Disappointed with latest Strawberry Perl
in thread Disappointed with latest Strawberry Perl

I think the fixed installation mostly stems from some weird belief that executables (and especially Perl) are not relocatable by default on Win32.

Unless I'm missing something, it's almost completely undocumented short of examining the source code.

Prompted by your post, from a little experimention and source code browsing in win32/win32.c, it looks like on Windows, perl.exe automatically sets @INC relative to $^X. However, most of the Perl toolchain looks to Config.pm and Config_heavy.pl to determine the right directories for various library paths, which is why things break oddly just moving the directory without patching those files. (I think that is what you're describing is the case.)

Given that, it should be fairly easy to patch Config.pm and Config_heavy.pl to just set the library paths similarly by looking relative to $^X

It also looks like perl.exe uses the long path for $^X and the derived pathnames. I wonder if those were the short pathnames instead whether things would work better if Perl were installed in places like "C:\Program Files\perl"?

-xdg

Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

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Re^11: Disappointed with latest Strawberry Perl
by syphilis (Archbishop) on Jan 01, 2008 at 09:14 UTC
    it should be fairly easy to patch Config.pm and Config_heavy.pl to just set the library paths similarly by looking relative to $^X

    I've done that a few times myself. It is, as you suggest, just a matter of hunting through Config.pm and Config_heavy.pl and replacing every occurrence of C:\original\location with D:\new\location (or whatever). Doing it manually (which is the only way I've ever done it) is a little tedious, but only takes a few minutes. As you've noted, @INC is self-adjusting, so there's no problem in that regard.

    Cheers,
    Rob
    Update: Ooops ... I now think xdg might have been suggesting something else than merely editing Config.pm and Config_heavy.pl.
[reply]
Re^11: Disappointed with latest Strawberry Perl
by Anonymous Monk on Jan 01, 2008 at 06:06 UTC
[reply]

      A post on Perl Monks is not the same as documentation.

      That doc mentions that @INC can be set from registry entries, but doesn't mention that it's otherwise set relative to the executable.

      -xdg

      Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

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