Bruce, everyone Mac-interested:
I believe many of the problems that have been seen come from the idea
that one can install the binary, and then expect upgrading from source
to work. I believe this will always be fragile: Mac OS X does not
come with an installed compiler for C or Fortran (they are available).
For these machines, the standard 'perl Makefile.PL' will fail.
Whether this is the cause of the recent problems is a separate
question.
The way I see it, there are two ways to go here:
A) assume that Mac is "just-another-version-of-Unix" so that
installations and upgrading from source should work.
B) assume that Mac is as special as Windows, and that ALL
installations and upgrades need
an actual installer or a simple, foolproof upgrade mechanism that
involves no users typing at a
terminal. An "upgrade" could simply consist of a zip file of new
files, but we'd need a program (like exists for Windows) that did this
upgrading semi-automatically.
If the perl upgrades were "pure perl" and did not include a
compilation, it could probably be made to work more reliably. But I
don't quite see that as the right solution, because it still expects
upgrades to happen with a different model than the original
installation.
Personally, I'm not thrilled about having to support option A. Option
B means that someone will have to do the work of making and testing
binary installers and upgrades. It will probably mean having to stick
close to Mac OS X upgrade cycle.
But I think we need a consensus on this. Any opinions?
--Matt
