"What perl looks like under debian" (Highlights from the perl-policy)

["Jeremiah C. Foster" <jeremiah@jeremiahfoster.com>]

Hello,

	Here is an excerpt from the presentation I am hoping to give
	in Copenhagen. Any feedback welcome.

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2a. What perl looks like under debian

    The version of perl on etch is now 5.8.8 but soon it will be 5.10
    when etch and a half is released. Debian packages perl according
    to the FHS (File Hierarchy Standard) to provide Debian users with
    a predictable file system layout. This allows software to be
    written because the system is already mapped, one knows where to
    find things. So the perl binary on a Debian system is in
    /usr/bin/perl, exactly where the FHS says it should be. This in
    turn allows you to write the shebang line in your debian perl
    scripts thusly: #!/usr/bin/perl. 

    On Debian, the order of perl, vendor, and site has been
    reversed. This of course means that @INC will search through the
    site dir to find installed modules first, then vendor, then
    finally perl although this is called "core" on debian and is
    reserved for those modules that ship with the perl binary itself,
    i.e. Test::More. These directories look like this:

site:   /usr/local/lib/perl/version
    	/usr/local/share/perl/version

vendor: /usr/lib/perl5
	/usr/share/perl5

core:   /usr/lib/perl/5.10
	/usr/share/perl/5.10
			
    To quote the perl-policy; "In each of the directory pairs above, 
    the lib component is for binary (XS) modules, and share for
    architecture-independent (pure-perl) modules."  So if you are
    going to install something from CPAN using cpan or cpanp, you
    would end up installing into /usr/local/{share,lib}/perl/5.xx if 
    you did not alter your cpan configuration. If you use apt-get or
    any other native debian package management tool to install a perl
    module, that module will get installed into /usr/{share,lib}/perl5/. 

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Thanks!
	Jeremiah