I'm new to Cyrus imapd - and, for that matter, to autoconf, perl, Linux, younameit. Building cyrus-imapd-2.1.10 on Mandrake 9.0, I ran into a problem that people have been running into for years: perl wants to find modules like Shell.pm under /usr/lib/perl5, but Shell.pm is actually getting installed under /usr/local/lib/perl5.
It turns out that line 83 of perl/Makefile.in is set to pass @prefix@ to perl/imap/Makefile.PL, the MakeMaker, er, maker. Reading the resulting perl/imap/Makefile, I get the impression that on most platforms, variables like INSTALLSITELIB are hardcoded to /usr/..., but on Mandrake, they are set to $PREFIX/... instead. Manually running Makefile.PL with no arguments fixes the problem; MakeMaker seems to know the "right" place to put things by default. A quick fix might be for perl/Makefile to only pass @prefix@ to perl/imap/Makefile.PL if it is not equal to $ac_default_prefix from configure. That way, default installs work, and explicit installs to different places work too. (Or at least they work to the extent they work today, which assumes that whatever your --prefix is, there are some site_perl directories in your @INC@ path. I have no idea how valid an assumption that really is, or if it's worth having configure warn you if you change your prefix.) An alternate fix would be for configure to go find perl, see where it's installed, add a new --perl-prefix argument that defaults here, and then pass THAT to Makefile.PL instead. Cyrus folks, what do you think? I don't have the background to know which of these two ideas is actually more portable or correct, but this problem seems to pop up fairly consistently on info-cyrus and on newsgroups.. sure would be nice to fix it. Jay Levitt
