Easier building of Perl

[JVromans@Squirrel.nl (Johan Vromans)]

The following thought crossed my mind last night, probably influenced
by the recent discussion on Perl's configure mechanism.

Would it be feasible to split the Perl configure process in two
stages. The first stage uses a reasonably small shell script to find
out major things like program locations and (some) libraries. This
information is used to build a miniature Perl interpreter (even less
than the current miniperl). This interpreter should be able to process
the Perl5 language, excluding the system dependent stuff.

In the second stage, the miniature interpreter processes a much bigger
configure script (Makefile.PL?) and gathers the information to build
the complete Perl interpreter.

Why this approach? I estimate that between 75 and 90% of the Perl
builds are on a system that has a running Perl interpreter already
installed. For these systems, building a new Perl would only require
the second stage. Also, if the Perl interpreter used in this stage is
a real one (as opposed to the miniature interpreter), much of the
things to configure are already known and can be used directly (after
verification). Only in very few specific situations a stage one build
on such a system would be required.

This is just an idea. I guess is has many aspects that need to be
investigated. But I think it may be worth considering.

-- Johan

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Follow-Ups from:

Andy Dougherty <doughera@lafayette.edu>

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