All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

RBuildMaker - day 1

djberg96 on 2003-01-19T20:09:09

I got together with Michael Granger and Martin Chase yesterday, and we spent a few hours working out how we wanted things to work for what we hope will become Ruby's standard installation mechanism, ala Perl Makefile.PL, etc.

We're modeling our work on Module::Build but it won't be a straight port. Specifically, Michael plans to do a bit more when it comes to extensions. One thing he wants to do is create symbolic links for library specific versions, ala somelib.so.1 would be a link to somelib.so (or something like that - don't pester me with details).

Anyway, we all woke up this morning and realized the same thing - Windows doesn't support symlinks! We could abandoned the whole idea, but the thought occurred to me that maybe we could emulate symlinks with shortcuts (.lnk files).

The problem with this idea is that the .lnk format isn't 100% clear, and MS ain't sharing. However, I did manage to dig up a document at wotsit.org (by searching on 'shorcut'). Now I'm wondering if Perl, Python, Ruby, etc could benefit from an extension, and have the symlink function generate .lnk files instead of just crashing, as they do now.

In the meantime, I'm working on the simpler stuff.

Don't forget to share ;)

autarch on 2003-01-19T22:13:51

Module::Build is still a work in progress, so if you come up with any ideas for the Ruby version that M::B doesn't have, please let Ken know, or just send email to the M::B list.

RBuildMaker

rubyfan on 2003-01-20T07:09:12

So doesn't Makefile.PL create a makefile?

There has been some discussion of doing something like this, but some folks in the ruby community think that the make requirement might not be so good for folks on Windoze (some unfortunates are trapped on that platform).

Also, this came over one of the ruby mailing lists today:
A few of us Denver-based ruby hackers have started collaboration on a new
library which we're tentatively calling ModuleBuilder, a hold-over from the
perl module Module::Builder from which we're stealing ideas. It intends to
be a full-featured library installation utility, combining mkmf, install.rb,
and bits ported from various perl modules together. We send this message
especially to those persons working on the auto-installation tools with the
request that you tell us what features you would want from a library such as
this. There is a current project page at
http://dev.FaerieMUD.org/ModuleBuilder/ to see what we plan on doing
already, so that you can avoid telling us to do those things again. ...maybe you could get together with them so as to not have to reinvent the wheel...

Phil

Re:RBuildMaker

djberg96 on 2003-01-20T15:31:38

That would be us! Yes, we're trying to avoid the make requirement, and the thought of creating a Ruby version of make has come up.

For now, you can find us in #mues on irc.freenode.net if you want to join in on this.

Are you in the Denver area?

Re:RBuildMaker

rubyfan on 2003-01-20T18:22:26

That would be us!
Oh, what a coincidence ;-)
Are you in the Denver area?
No, I'm in the Portland area... I gave the ruby talk at the Portland Perlmongers a few weeks back.