Re: [MacPerl] MacPerl and OS X (yet again :-)

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 11:00 +0900 2000.09.26, Joel Rees wrote:
>Adding options to cp is probably not a good idea. Better to write your
>own cp with newline filtering options. Or, better still, just save the
>one-liner Chris mentions here as a script (say, newlnfilter) and pipe I/O
>that needs to be filtered through your brand-new filter:
>
>     % cat source.pl | newlnfilter > target.pl
>
>Which points out the killer problem (killer solution waiting to be found)
>hidden behind the excitement about scripting. With true scripting,
>program options don't have to be added. The desired effects can be
>achieved by external filter programs. Non-algebraically minded users tend
>to blur the distinction between option and filter, but that's no big
>deal. (Well, maybe it's a pride issue for some engineers and
>theoreticians like myself about ten years ago.)

That's all true, but I specifically had in mind the h* tools I used to use
in  the MkLinux distributions, like hcp that would do newline conversions
for you and copy from mounted HFS volumes.  I don't really care what method
is used, except insofar as Joe User has an easy go of it.


>>Also note: perl 5.6 comes with Mac OS X Beta, but there is no perldoc,
>>pod2man, etc.  Of course, there are no compilers or other build tools,
>>either (yet; I understand they will be made available).
>
>I wonder why. I see lots of pods and manpages about perl. The source code
>should be easy enough to compile. License issues?

Well, I imagine the perldoc/pod2man/etc. omissions were oversights.  They
are just perl programs that need to be run:

   perl pod2man.PL
   cp pod2man /usr/bin

So it is not hard.  :-)  As to the build tools (cc, make, etc.), those I
expect to see in a distribution for us Mac OS X Beta users at some point in
the near future.


>>Well, I see little or no need for the MacPerl application.  As for
>>droplets, well, they would be pretty simple to create in Mac OS X.  Now,
>>here is the bad news: I made a perl script executable (chmod a+x), but it
>>appears as a text file.  This is Bad.  However, I imagine it would be
>>mostly trivial to create an executable wrapper for the script, just like
>>the current droplet code, which would send the script and the dropped
>>contents to /usr/bin/perl instead of MacPerl.
>
>Ahh! I see you have run into one of the walls between UNIX and Mac. While
>you would not want chmod to mess with the actual contents of the file,
>you might hope that the system commands for UNIX would influence the Mac
>side's interpretation of a file. But this would basically require the Mac
>OS version of chmod to build the underlying package structure around the
>file being converted to executable, move the file down in the directory
>structure, and generate an alias in the file's original position.

I don't see why.  Why couldn't the Desktop app just see that it is +x, and
then allow me to drop files on it, and when I do, launch a terminal, chdir
to where the original file is, and run the executable with that file?  It
doesn't seem Hard to me at all to do that much.  For extra points, a
terminal window would only actually come up if there was output from the
program; otherwise, it would just happen in the background.

-- 
Chris Nandor                      pudge@pobox.com    http://pudge.net/
Open Source Development Network    pudge@osdn.com     http://osdn.com/

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