[illumos-Developer] On Perl

[John Sonnenschein]

On Mar 15, 2011, at 10:11 AM, John Sonnenschein wrote:

> What would need to change on the distribution side is to deliver one extra package, the name of which I have no opinion of (though I do think that it should be micro-version agnostic such as perl-512 or similar) which delivers /usr/perl5/5.12 , and the /usr/perl5/bin/perl symlink . This requires no change to /usr/bin/perl, since no system software depends on it.
> 

On second thought and discussion on IRC, I think the /usr/perl5/bin/perl symlink ought to be delivered by ON as a special package that contains only that symlink. runtime/perl/system or similar. If ON is going to mandate a particular version of perl, build modules against same, and use it with system software ( like intrd(1M) ) it may make sense for it to be ON's responsibility to choose that Perl

The implication for developers here is they would only need to provide a perl package that lives in /usr/perl5/5.12  and nothing else. /usr/bin/perl can still point at whatever they like