Re: Anyone installing Perl modules?

[Bill Moseley <moseley at hank dot org>]

On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 03:17:33PM -0400, Eric Siegerman wrote:
> On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 11:48:20AM -0700, Bill Moseley wrote:
> > But, is there a better or more common way to install my Perl modules into the system @INC 
> > using Automake/autoconf?  There still should be a way to override where they are installed 
> > with a configure switch.
> 
> I tend to use Stow for that.  Note that this is a choice I make
> as the installer of a given package; the package's maintainer
> doesn't need to have done anything beyond implementing --prefix
> or the equivalent, which of course you get for free with
> autoconf.

I need to look at Stow more.  I like the idea of installing into a package directory and 
using symlinks,  although I'm not sure how that would work on Windows...  Not to mention I'm 
still trying to recover from learning (part of) autotools.

I also have a Perl module with an xs extension in our package that I'd like to have built 
with the normal configure && make && make install.

> > If I install a helper program in libexecdir (which is not in the $PATH), what is the best 
> > way to portably add that path in my C program (for either a popen() or fork/exec to run the 
> > program)?
> 
> The safest way is not to depend on the path at all.  Instead,
> hard-code the path in the caller.  Of course, that should only
> happen at configure time :-)  That is, have the caller do the
> equivalent of:
> 	execv("${libexecdir}/helper", args);

Ok, that what I'll do.  Thanks.

I'd like to ask for some more advice about perl.  This is for the Swish-e search engine.  
Swish-e is a C program that just parses docs and creates a reverse index.  Swish-e can 
index a directory tree, but to index a web site (spider) it uses a helper script written in 
Perl.

Now, in that model, swish-e gets installed in $bindir, and the helper script ends up in 
$libexecdir.  That makes sense because swish-e runs the spider Perl script.

But two issues have come up that make me wonder if that helper script should not be in 
bindir.

First, since $libexecdir is typically not in either @INC or in $PATH, you can not use 
perldoc to read the docs for the script.  Minor problem because docs can be read in HTML 
format on the Swish-e web site (also in $prefix/doc/swish-e/html).

But the other problem is that some users are running the helper script outside of swish.  So 
in that case it would be nice to have the script in $bindir.

Yes, in some ways I don't want to "polute" the path with helper programs.

Any suggestions on where to put helper programs?


Thanks,


-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org