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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Why is Perl on Mac such a disaster 9 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • You're way off base on this one.

    I've been using Mac for Perl dev for about 6-7 years (whenever OS X 10.1 came out) and consider it first class. The Mac:: packages are largely irrelevant -- Carbon is a legacy API from the 90s, about as relevant today as a Win95-specific API would be I suppose. If you used a Win95:: library, you'd get similar complaints from users of a modern Windows OS.

    The "flood" of Win32:: packages is because you need those platform-specific hacks to get anything done on Windows Perl. N

    • File::HomeDir, for the Mac, requires Mac::Files which is unfortunately bundled with Mac::Carbon. The latter does not and will never run on a 64-bit Perl, but that's the direction we're going. Because Bundle::CPAN requires File::HomeDir, a fresh Perl installation on a Mac is very painful if you have a 64-bit Perl. I had to manually install File::HomeDir after locally patching it to work around the Mac::Files pain.

      • Ovid, no, you're significantly wrong.

        First, let me correct what Alias said: Mac::Carbon has always worked reliably. It has not always INSTALLED reliably, due to changes that break both compiling and testing.

        Second, as to Mac::Files specifically, you cannot separate it from Mac-Carbon. There is no reason to do that: the same reasons why much of Mac-Carbon as a whole won't run on 64-bit perl, is the same reason why Mac::Files also won't. In fact, Mac::Files probably has more incompatibilies with 64-bit than any of the other modules in Mac-Carbon: we rely heavily in Mac-Carbon on the FSSpec type (and the corresponding APIs) that is provided (and used heavily) by Mac::Files, but this has been replaced by FSRef.

        To sum up, if you're going to make Mac::Files work on 64-bit, that would be most of the work required to get Mac-Carbon as a whole working on 64-bit. And it's a chore, and might not be worth the effort. Although someday I would like to get Mac::Glue running on 64-bit, so I'll be looking into it eventually.

        The answer (for both the reasons of immediate 64-bit compatibility, and for ease in installation of HomeDir) is -- as Alias said -- to have a replacement. This could be Carbon or Cocoa. Doesn't really matter. FindFolder itself should work just fine in 64-bit, for a long time. Of course, Cocoa might be better for future-proofing, but it will likely be a long time before Carbon's FindFolder stops working. If my help is desired, it'll be Carbon, since I don't know Cocoa well.

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