[gentoo-dev] IF YOUR EBUILD USES PERL, PLEASE READ

[Michael Cummings]

Sorry for the caps, but sometimes it's the surest way to get attention.

If your ebuild uses perl, there are some things you need to be aware of. Perl 5.6.1's default MakeMaker module, that portion that creates the make file from the perl Makefile.PL file, was flawed. Although it didn't violate the sandbox, it doesn't always honor your target build directories. It also failed to recognize build syntax that it was supposed to understand, such as not always honoring the PREFIX you passed it. Because the potential harm outweighed the mess I have now, this has been fixed for future/current users. THIS ONLY AFFECTS EBUILDS THAT USE PERL MAKEFILE, NOT EBUILDS THAT MERELY COMPILE AGAINST PERL'S LIBRARIES/BINARIES.

The result? If your ebuild at any point generates a perl module as an add on, and you are manually passing it a "perl Makfile.PL" instead of incorporating the perl-modules eclass, it *will* break. These bugs are getting assigned to me right now, and I am fixing them, but I wanted to make you aware should you have a new release come up and you don't check to see if any changes were made to the ebuild since last time.

If you need a piece-meal example of incorporating the perl-module.eclass, I would recommend looking at the (masked) cyrus-imapd ebuild. I have rewritten the portion that deals with the perl module and included the inherit perl-module line to make it work. It isn't pretty, but it is using the eclass fully.

Please ping me if you have any questions, happy to answer, sometimes even coherenly. =:)


Mike

I would strongly encourage using the inherit perl-module if at all possible (and of course applicable).