[nycbug-talk] upgrading perl and all deps (FreeBSD)

[Johnny Lam]

Charles Sprickman wrote:
> 
> If you make the mistake of just running portupgrade on perl, you end up 
> with quite a mess - portupgrade will fix up the dependencies in the pkg 
> db, but it will basically break all your modules since the location of the 
> modules changes with each version of perl.  You would then have to 

You may want to discuss with the FreeBSD Ports perl maintainer a 
different strategy for installing Perl.  I maintain Perl in pkgsrc, and
I've modified our Perl package in two major ways:

(1) Install modules into "vendor" directories instead of "site"
     directories.

(2) Install modules in a directory named after the Perl ABI version
     instead of the actual version number, e.g. the Perl ABI version
     number for the 5.8.x releases is "5.8.0, so modules are found in
     /usr/pkg/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.0 and not
     /usr/pkg/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8.

The first point allows allows site-local Perl modules to be installed by 
the local admin without affecting pkgsrc-managed files.  The second
point allows for binary upgrades/replacements of ABI-compatible versions
of Perl without affecting any installed modules.  The current pkgsrc
perl sources may be found at:

	http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/pkgsrc/lang/perl5/

	Cheers,

	-- Johnny Lam <jlam at pkgsrc.org>