Re^2: Darwin and File::HomeDir

[ikegami]

Perl is usually not installed under “Program Files” but directly under the root, like it was still 1986.

Only with Strawberry Perl (which is why I'll never use it). ActivePerl lets you choose, and has done so since I started using it (5.6).

I've worked around that by using the short-name alias for the intended directory

That would require making a link in the root directory at least as recently as WinXP, and I consider that unacceptable.

[John M. Dlugosz]

I was referring to ActivePerl. If you override the suggested location and restore it to the normal location for programs, lots of things break later. Using the short-name alias instead works most of the time.

[ikegami]

That's not true either. That may be true if you install it into a path with a space in it, but you can definitely use something other than the suggested location safely.

Using the short-name alias instead works most of the time.

I'm not going to avoid putting it in the root just to create a link in the root. That would be silly.

[John M. Dlugosz]

Short-name alias to "Program Files" already exists, and might be called PROGRA~1. That's where I installed. It sets entries to where its stuff is, using that string. But running something from the command line still sees the name "Program Files" unless you change the current working directory to the short alias explicitly first; programs that are smart and look up their actual location using the Win32 API get the real name, and perhaps other things.

Point is, it does not always work, and I've given up trying to put ActivePerl in a location other than directly under the root. Even then, it's a royal pain if a module is not already in their special repository, and if it's not pure Perl, you can forget it.

That's my experience from pre-release days when the company was called HIP, through around 5.6 when I stopped trying to install it other than where it likes to put it. In the early days I suggested that the installer simply use the short-name alias of the normal path or whatever path the user chose, and they told me directly that it's still not good enough which is why they still put it off the root.