ITP: Inline (and odd pure-install problem)

[Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>]

I'm packaging Inline.pm. (Well, I have, more or less.)

I ran into an odd problem with Inline's C compiling. It uses MakeMaker
to greate a temporary Makefile that is used to compile the C code and
make a shared library of it. (Let me stress this happens at run time,
not at build time...) At the end, it runs make pure_install,
which fails:

mkdir /usr/local/share/perl: Permission denied at
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/ExtUtils/Install.pm line 81

I eventually figured out that if I throw in a PREFIX=. , it would stop
trying to write to /usr/local. All the make install actually installs is
this:

joey@silk:~/debian/packages/libinline-perl/C/_Inline_test/build/_01syntax_t_6b3a>find
foo -ls
1079584    4 drwxrwxr-x   3 joey     joey         4096 Jun  6 17:30 foo
1079585    4 drwxrwxr-x   3 joey     joey         4096 Jun  6 17:30 foo/local
1079586    4 drwxrwxr-x   3 joey     joey         4096 Jun  6 17:30 foo/local/share
1079587    4 drwxrwxr-x   3 joey     joey         4096 Jun  6 17:30 foo/local/share/perl
1079588    4 drwxrwxr-x   2 joey     joey         4096 Jun  6 17:30 foo/local/share/perl/5.6.1

So I used this to hack around the problem, which must be specific to
debian's pure_install.

I wonder if this behavior of making empty directories even though
nothing goes in them is similar to the pure_install behavior of making
these directories, which I'm sure exist, empty, in quite a few perl
modules packages:

drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2001-06-06 17:14:32 ./usr/lib/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2001-06-06 17:14:32 ./usr/lib/perl5/

I never understood why it did that..

-- 
see shy jo