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Date:      Thu, 9 May 2002 19:52:34 -0400
From:      Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
To:        Jordan DeLong <fracture@allusion.net>, Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@starjuice.net>
Cc:        current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: The future of perl on FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <p0511175ab900b9927511@[128.113.24.47]>
In-Reply-To: <20020509182927.A71548@allusion.net>
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0205090821380.98498-100000@pebkac.owp.csus.edu> <691.1020958309@axl.seasidesoftware.co.za> <20020509182927.A71548@allusion.net>

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At 6:29 PM -0500 5/9/02, Jordan DeLong wrote:
>  > Symlink or redirector, but please not this. :-)
>
>Shouldn't ports *not* touch anything outside of ${PREFIX}?
>I, for one, can't stand when ports do that
>(except /etc/shells -- that's different).

I agree.  That's why a redirector makes more sense, because
the redirector can be part of the base-system, and the port
can be installed in /usr/local.

>Seems that neither symlink nor redirector is neccesary;
>portable perl shebangs use #!/usr/bin/env perl to search
>$PATH for it, and if the local sysadmin wants they can
>make a symlink.

Many many perl scripts already exist which do not do this.
Yes, we now know that it would be more portable to write
a script that way, but that doesn't magically change all
the scripts which are already written and which are very
used to assuming that perl is at /usr/bin/perl.

Also, the /usr/bin/env approach means that scripts are
now subject to the setting of $PATH, and that is not
necessarily a good thing.  Remember that the person
running the script is not necessarily the person who
wrote it, and is not necessarily aware that it even
is a perl script, or that PATH is important when
running that script.  (PATH would not be important
for a script which is using /usr/bin/perl)

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu

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