[OpenIndiana-discuss] Building Applications

[Kevin J. Woolley]

On Thursday, 14 October, 2010 14:19, "Alasdair Lumsden" <alasdairrr at gmail.com> said:

> Hi Russell,
> 
> That looks like an oversight in the OS worth addressing.
> 
> I imagine getting a combined 32/64bit perl on the system would be very difficult,
> given perl modules install native extensions. Essentially you'd need separate
> extension directories and at that point you may as well have two separate perl
> prefixes. Perhaps an optional installable /usr/perl5-64 ?
> 
> I'd be interested to hear what suggestions people have, as none of the options I
> can think of are terribly neat and tidy.

I don't believe a combined 32/64-bit Perl is possible.  If it was, it'd still be pretty icky, from an implementation point of view.  (Is it possible for a 64-bit binary to dynamically load 32-bit libs?  I'm pretty sure the reverse isn't possible.)

Two separate prefixes isn't a bad thing, and it's what I used in my testing set-ups when I tested Perl releases for $dayjob.  I'd have /opt/perl32 and /opt/perl64 (for example), then either change my path to pick up just one of them or symlink one perl executable into /opt/bin and run it from there.  It's easy enough to change manually once you've done a "file /usr/bin/perl" to figure out what's going on, and even easier to add a switch-to-perl64.sh or whatever to redo the symlinks if someone wants to change the default Perl.

Cheers,

kjw