Re: [MacPerl] Installing on Users' Macs

[Matthew Langford <langfml [at] eng [dot] auburn [dot] edu>]

On Fri, 4 Dec 1998, Andrew M. Langmead wrote:

> Matthew Langford <langfml [at] eng [dot] auburn [dot] edu> writes:
> 
> >If MacPerl is already present, what then?  (Is there an easy way to
> >determine this, and can it also determine the presence/version of
> >modules?) 
> 
> What if most of the MacPerl application (except for the IDE) was made
> into a shared library that could exist in the extentions folder, and
> the standard modules were put in the preferences folder.
> 
> Any perl program that was meant to be distributed and used some sort
> of "installer" program could check if the shared library was present
> before installing, bypassing it if it was present, and check for its
> needed modules. The user (who will get perl without the IDE) won't
> have a strange application that they don't think they need.

This sounds good to me, except I think the ShL/executable runtime and
module folder tree should live in the same place--either "MacPerl" in the
System folder, or Extensions or Application Support sub-System folders.
I've always thought code should stay out of the Preferences directory.
YMMV.

Using file presence or absence or mod-date is probably a harder way to
figure out module information than asking perl (or less flexible), but if
the installer doesn't know Perl, that may be the only option.

I don't know enough about any potential limitations of shared libraries to
know whether or not all of the base perl could reside there.  (Is the
program simply going to load and jump to the shared library with
itself--the part that needs interpreting--as an argument?)

--
MattLangford 


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