The methods provided by this package are designed to be used in conjunction
with ExtUtils::MakeMaker. When MakeMaker writes a Makefile, it creates one
or more objects that inherit their methods from a package MM.
MM itself doesn't provide any methods, but it
ISA ExtUtils::MM_Unix class. The inheritance tree of
MM lets operating specific packages take the responsibility for all the methods provided by MM_Unix. We are trying to reduce the number of the necessary overrides by defining rather primitive operations within ExtUtils::MM_Unix.
If you are going to write a platform specific
MM package, please try to limit the necessary
overrides to primitive methods, and if it is not possible to do so, let's
work out how to achieve that gain.
If you are overriding any of these methods in your Makefile.PL (in the
MY class), please report that to the makemaker mailing list. We are trying to minimize the necessary method overrides and switch to data driven Makefile.PLs wherever possible. In the long run less methods will be overridable via the
MY class.
The following description of methods is still under development. Please
refer to the code for not suitably documented sections and complain loudly
to the makemaker mailing list.
Not all of the methods below are overridable in a Makefile.PL. Overridable
methods are marked as (o). All methods are overridable by a platform
specific MM_*.pm file (See
MM_VMS) and MM_OS2).
Concatenate two or more directory names to form a complete path ending with a directory. But remove the trailing slash from the resulting string, because it doesn't look good, isn't necessary and confuses
OS2. Of course, if this is the root directory, don't cut off the trailing slash :-)
Does very much the same as the cflags script in the perl distribution. It doesn't return the whole compiler command line, but initializes all of its parts. The const_cccmd method then actually returns the definition of the
CCCMD macro which uses these parts.
Takes an array of directories that need to exist and returns a Makefile entry for a .exists file in these directories. Returns nothing, if the entry has already been processed. We're helpless though, if the same directory comes as
$(FOO) _and_ as ``bar''. Both of them get an entry, that's why we use ``::''.
Guess the name of this package by examining the working directory's name. MakeMaker calls this only if the developer has not supplied a
NAME attribute.
Returns true if
C,
XS,
MYEXTLIB or similar objects exist within this object that need a compiler. Does not descend into subdirectories as
needs_linking() does.
Takes a path to a file that is found by init_dirscan and returns false if we don't want to include this file in the library. Mainly used to exclude
RCS,
CVS, and
SCCS directories from installation.
Called by staticmake. Defines how to write the Makefile to produce a static
new perl.
By default the Makefile produced includes all the static extensions in the
perl library. (Purified versions of library files, e.g.,
DynaLoader_pure_p1_c0_032.a are automatically ignored to avoid link
errors.)
misnamed method (will have to be changed). The MM_Unix method just returns
the argument without further processing.
On
VMS used to insure that colons marking targets are preceded by space - most Unix Makes don't need this, but it's necessary under
VMS to distinguish the target delimiter from a colon appearing as part of a filespec.
Takes one argument, a file name, and returns the file name, if the argument
is likely to be a perl script. On MM_Unix this is true for any ordinary,
readable file.
Returns the attribute PERM_RW or the string 644. Used as the string that is passed to the chmod command to set the permissions for read/writeable files. MakeMaker chooses 644 because it has turned out in the past that relying on the umask provokes
hard-to-track bugreports. When the return value is used by the perl
function chmod, it is interpreted as an octal value.
Returns the attribute PERM_RWX or the string 755, i.e. the string that is passed to the chmod command to set the permissions for executable files. See also perl_rw.
Defines
SHELL,
LD,
TOUCH,
CP,
MV,
RM_F,
RM_RF,
CHMOD,
UMASK_NULL in the Makefile. Also defines the perl programs
MKPATH,
WARN_IF_OLD_PACKLIST,
MOD_INSTALL.
DOC_INSTALL, and
UNINSTALL.
This is internal method that returns name of a file that is passed to linker to define symbols to be exported.
UNIX does not have one but
OS2 and Win32 do.
We are painfully aware that these documents may contain incorrect links and
misformatted HTML. Such bugs lie in the automatic translation process
that automatically created the hundreds and hundreds of separate documents that you find here. Please do
not report link or formatting bugs, because we cannot fix
per-document problems. The only bug reports that will help us are those
that supply working patches to the installhtml or pod2html
programs, or to the Pod::HTML module itself, for which I and the entire
Perl community will shower you with thanks and praises.
If rather than formatting bugs, you encounter substantive content errors in these documents, such as mistakes in
the explanations or code, please use the perlbug utility included
with the Perl distribution.
--Tom Christiansen, Perl Documentation Compiler and Editor