Re: What am I doing wrong? A bad end-user experience
[email protected] (demerphq)
| Newsgroups | perl.perl5.porters |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <CANgJU+V5XjQCCx7QGTGg0GHc=7EGJiWWkwQ4-_=S6Gxv9C_KYw@mail.gmail.com> |
On Sat, 12 Sept 2026 at 16:21, Ovid <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Sep 10, 2026 at 2:28 PM demerphq <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Thu, 10 Sept 2026 at 13:49, Paul "LeoNerd" Evans < >> [email protected]> wrote: >> >>> I keep a bunch of perl modules in my $HOME: >>> >>> $ env | grep PERL >>> PERL5LIB=/home/leo/lib/perl5 >>> PERL_MB_OPT=--install_base=/home/leo >>> PERL_MM_OPT=INSTALL_BASE=/home/leo >>> >>> I use system perl. >>> >> >> Yeah, well, that is where you go wrong. It is long and well established >> that it is unwise to modify their system perl. Doing so is highly likely >> to break your OS. >> >> Perl very well may be used in the OS'es build chain, and upgrading >> modules can and will break things. >> > Would it be worth having cpan emit a non-fatal warning when an > installation appears likely to affect the system Perl? > > I doubt we can do this reliably, > I guess it depends on what you mean by reliably, but it seems to me that system perls are normally installed via a package manager, and are built by the OS distributors, so they certainly could proactively set something in their build/Configure that we could detect from CPAN or other installers. I agree detecting it without involvement of the packager is more fraught with difficulty, but if it really is a system perl where it matters then it will be. If you manually install a perl, then I wouldn't call it a system perl. Hope you and yours are well Ovid, cheers, yves -- perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"