From owner-freebsd-current Wed May 8 18: 3:50 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mail.rpi.edu (mail.rpi.edu [128.113.22.40]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0863737B40D; Wed, 8 May 2002 18:03:33 -0700 (PDT) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.netel.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by mail.rpi.edu (8.12.1/8.12.1) with ESMTP id g4913HnG019006; Wed, 8 May 2002 21:03:18 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: drosih@mail.rpi.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: <20020508075543.A5E5838CC@overcee.wemm.org> Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 21:03:17 -0400 To: Dag-Erling Smorgrav , Peter Wemm From: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Re: The future of perl on FreeBSD Cc: Robert Watson , Mark Murray , current@FreeBSD.ORG Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.3 (www dot roaringpenguin dot com slash mimedefang) Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 12:18 AM +0200 5/9/02, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: >Peter Wemm writes: > > We have several choices.. From installing a symlink > > pointing to wherever the default perl package is, > > through to a simple redirector that searches > > $PATH and/or looks in a few well-known locations. > >As previously posted... Here at RPI, we do something similar to this for some of the interpretters we provide (both for shells and things like perl). Our redirector-program is about 600 lines, but some of that is to handle multi-platform issues, and some of the rest is probably overkill. Still, you probably want a more complicated re-direction program than the one you posted. People will invoke a script by invoking the script (okay, that sounds stupid, but...), not by making sure their PATH has the right perl in it. People might fully-specify the script to run, and still have unintended consequences because there is some other program named 'perl' somewhere in their path. In many situations this is not an issue, but at other times it can open some subtle security issues. One of the nice things about using a redirector program, though, is that it also allows the user a way to set which version of perl they want to use, even if multiple copies of perl are installed, and they can do it on a session-by- session basis. That's the reason we did it at RPI. The idea has proved to be very useful over the past nine years. The code we still use at RPI would be a mess to use for this freebsd idea, but I could write up something halfway between DES's example and RPI's code if people would be curious to see it. But I don't know if we want to start yet another bikeshed if we haven't finished the last one... -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message