[illumos-Developer] On Perl

[Albert Lee]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 1:43 PM, John Sonnenschein
<johnsonnenschein at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>>

My understanding of the proposal was that:
* illumos-gate will deliver the /usr/perl5/bin/perl symlink [1] using
a well-known package name, along with its consumers.
* Distributions currently providing /usr/perl5/bin/perl should have it
split into its own package using the same name as the package from
illumos-gate (not necessarily the pkg(5) name, but whatever it gets
transformed into in the distro's packaging).
* Distributions will be under a contract to provide /usr/perl5/5.12 in
some form. [2]

This allows onu to replace /usr/perl5/bin/perl on a running system.

Does this match what you had in mind?

[1] Technically. /usr/perl5/{bin,man,pod} symlinks to ../5.12
[2] The pkg manifests in illumos should probably spell out
pkg:/runtime/perl-512 as a dependency for IPS systems.

-Albert