Hi perl.qa,
hopefully, this message will not provoke another flame war about
Module::Install and Module::Build. Please don't feel tempted. I don't
care which build system you use if it works.
Versions of Module::Install < 0.61 do not work on the current ActivePerl
release 5.8.8 build 817. There are *a lot* of CPAN distributions that
use Module::Install versions in the 0.3X range. In fact the most modules
that use Module::Install are still 0.3X. For example an integral
distribution like Scalar-List-Utils is using Module::Install 0.37. You
can find a complete (and somewhat current) list of problematic modules
at http://steffen-mueller.net/mi_old.html
Installing modules from CPAN on win32 is really frustrating if you have
to do the following dance for every other module you install:
(install current Module::Install once, then:)
> look Foo::Bar
$ rm -rf inc/
$ perl Makefile.PL
$ make
$ make install
$ exit
This is particularly nasty if it happens somewhere in the dependency chain.
Why am I posting here?
a) Perhaps some of those distributions belong to you. If so, please
consider releasing a new version with a more current Module::Install or
without using Module::Install at all.
b) You care about perl and CPAN qa. What can we do to motivate authors
to upgrade?
Keep in mind that a kitten, err, a would-be win32 Perl programmer and/or
user is turned away for every module that doesn't install because of
this. In particular, the above solution for a module that doesn't
install cleanly isn't known to just anybody because the error you get
isn't self-explanatory.
Ideas?
Steffen
