* demerphq <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2006-03-31 10:10]: > Something like dieing on a use warnings statement in the > makefile or whatever to me constitutes a pre-build failure, not > an install failure.
`s/installer/build script/gi` on Adam’s post and his points still stand. The whatever-it’s-called whose job it is to generate the dependency information must take care to never abort and always produce some useful information, else there’s nothing useful to do for the whatever-it’s-called whose job it is to take this information and act on it. Gtk2-Perl had this problem, where the `Makefile.PL` in Gtk2 depends on the code generation stuff in the Glib distribution, and both that and the `Makefile.PL` in Glib depend on ExtUtils::PkgConfig and ExtUtils::Depend. Because of this, it used to be that saying `cpan -i Gtk2` would fail unless you manually installed the modules in the right order. Now there is some hackery to avoid bombing out completely uselessly, but you still end up having to re-run the command a few times until it actually succeeds. I think the way to address this would be for `Makefile.PL` or equiv. to be able to tell the shell that it couldn’t actually complete because it requires some missing dependencies, so that the shell can then go and fetch/build/install those dependencies and then re-run the `Makefile.PL`. Then the hackery used by the Gtk2-Perl suite would actually work correctly, without the user having to re-run commands manually in order to unwind the build dependency tree. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
