[Pdx-pm] Is the ExtUtils::Installed in Perl 5.10 broken?

Igal Koshevoy igal at pragmaticraft.com
Wed Jun 24 11:37:06 PDT 2009


I believe that I've found the underlying issue.

I use GNU Stow, a very useful tool written in Perl that provides a handy
way of installing things into paths like /usr/local/stow/git-1.6.3.3 and
then manages symlinks into /usr/local. It makes it easy to install
different versions of software outside my OS's package manager and
switch between them. For additional details about GNU Stow, please read
<http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/127393>.

My trouble was that my "/usr/local/share/perl/5.10.0" hierarchy was
empty, since this was being run on a freshly installed OS without any
other modules installed, so Stow decided to replace it with a symlink to
my Git's instance of this directory because Git actually had content for
this directory. This relinking is usually a reasonable thing, but was
the wrong thing to do in this case, but shouldn't have been fatal.

Unfortunately, there's something in ExtUtils::Installed that really,
really doesn't this sort of thing. It refused to traverse the symlinked
directory and didn't see the .packlist files within. Once I uninstalled
Acme::please, unstowed Git, installed Acme::please, and stowed Git, all
was well again.

If I have time, I'll try to find out what in specific is going wrong
with ExtUtils::Installed handling of symlinked directories.

Anyway, I suppose that my particular problem is resolved for now. Thanks
to Ben, Eric and Eric for pitching in to help.

-igal


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