OK, what I am up to. 1. I am finishing up utilities for module porters/developers and module users for creating and unpacking .tar.gz archives. They require Compress::Zlib (a shared library, only works with PPC and CFM68K MacPerls), Archive::Tar, and Mac::Conversions (on Paul Schinder's site). Binary files are converted to macbinary by the creation utility, and unpacked by the unpacking utility. Newlines are converted by both utilities. So you have an easy, free, way to unpack any tar.gz archive. *CAVEAT* I will likely make a special util or flag that does no translation on unpacking, in case the unpack program guesses wrong. It could think a file is text when it is not, for instance, and mangle it. 2. I am finishing up a port of CPAN.pm. I have it mostly working with my Mac. It uses the same unpacking mechanism as above. 3. I am still working on changes to ExtUtils::MM_MacOS, which is used in the build/install process by MacPerl and ExtUtils::MakeMaker. 4. I am working with CPAN people to find a way to put these things on CPAN and have them integrated with the CPAN mechanisms. Right now, it looks like we will have a special namespace, similar to Bundle::, which will be fore binary distributions. So you would not get: DBI-1.05-bin-1-MacOS.tar.gz You would get something like: Binary-DBI-1.05-MacOS-1.tar.gz And in MacPerl, you could run this script: #!perl -wMCPAN shell And type: cpan> install Binary::DBI That's the plan being discussed, anyway. So, now, any comments, suggestions, concerns? -- Chris Nandor mailto:pudge@pobox.com http://pudge.net/ %PGPKey = ('B76E72AD', [1024, '0824090B CE73CA10 1FF77F13 8180B6B6']) ***** Want to unsubscribe from this list? ***** Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to mac-perl-request@iis.ee.ethz.ch