in reply to RFC: A Primer on Writing Portable Perl Programs
First, thanks for taking on this subject. Working on Vanilla Perl has been an interesting lesson on just how many common Perl modules weren't written for portability. However, the meditation focuses a lot on Windows, so I'd either consider broadening the OSes covered or else changing the title.
That said, I found version 0 of the tutorial to be substantially less informative than perlport. If you're looking for a gentler introduction, I'd suggest taking perlport as the base and then translating it into something that is easier for a less experienced programmer to understand. There's a lot more to portability that what you've covered above.
I suggest you look at win32.perl.org -- there's a good deal of information there that will be of use. Search for "Problem Modules" and you can see a large variety of real-world portability problems in CPAN modules, some of which have been fixed and many of which have not.
Some other random thoughts that occurred to me in reading the tutorial:
- Mention perlport at the beginning, not the end.
- forking and signals
- line endings
- Making sure File::Spec is up to date -- lots of bug fixes since the last core release.
- Modules I've found helpful: IPC::Run3, File::HomeDir, ExtUtils::Command, Probe::Perl
All that said, I look forward to the next version.
-xdg
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