Alien::Base Grant - Report #3
Fri, 25-May-2012 by
Makoto Nozaki
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< started [really exciting](http://static.cpantesters.org/distro/A/Alien-Base.html). I had tracked down several bugs and was honing in on full Linux compatibiliy. Turns out much of my testing problems had been in the test suite, wherein I mimiced make/Makefile with a perl script (in the name of Xplatform) but made some incorrect assumptions.
The problem came when I went to look at OS X. The problem I have found is that Mac bakes the full path to the library into the library itself during compiling/linking. It can be changed manually as long as the new path is shorter than the old one! Yes there are work-arounds but they would involve delving into the library's Makefile, which I have been ardently trying to avoid (opens a pandoras box). The other mechanism would be to target the library to install in the final place directly, but this breaks the usual workflow of installing a Perl module, in which `perl Build.PL` and `./Build` do not do anything permenant, waiting until `./Build install` to move the files to their final places.
This problem cropped up a few weeks ago and since then my work on Alien::Base has been residing in the grey-matter, hoping a solution would present itself. I don't want to say "forget Mac" because the whole point of `Alien` is to be as cross-platform as possible, still I keep coming back to thinking that perhaps an early release might have to forgo Mac initially.
My research has picked up, some of you may have seen my [`PerlGSL`](http://p3rl.org/PerlGSL) and related modules arrive this month; these modules are not purely a diversion from `Alien::Base` but rather they have been critial in some simulations I am developing. These and my thesis have taken some time from `Alien::Base` but I knew that (and disclosed it) going into the grant.
I am targeting a Linux release before next month's grant report as most of the API seems sufficient, though I am reluctant to release while the Mac issue is outstanding like this. Hopefully the Perl Foundation will be patient with me as I deal with these pressing matters both inside and outside of the `Alien::Base` project.
*Original article at [Joel Berger \[blogs.perl.org\]](http://blogs.perl.org/users/joel_berger/2012/05/alienbase-perl-foundation-grant-report-month-3.html).*
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