[gentoo-dev] Use Perl vendor directories?

[Robert Coie <rac@intrigue.com>]

A quick hunt through the last few months of archives of this list
didn't turn up any similar discussion, but apologies if I'm rehashing
an old flamewar.  To make matters worse, I'm not really sure which
side I'm on, as I may simply not understand the Gentoo philosophy yet.

When I began experimenting with ebuilds for addon perl modules, I
noticed that the stock Gentoo ebuilds (IO-String was one I tried)
install into the site directories, which I had always thought reserved
for local installation, and off-limits to system installs.  In
practice, I tend to use site directories to quickly see if a new
upstream version fixes some problem I may be having with a package.
If I find otherwise (or have different or worse problems with the new
version), it is nice to be able to simply wipe it out of the site
directories, and have the old functionality provided by the system
remain intact.  This would not seem to be possible in the current
state of Gentoo.

As a first crack at a solution, I looked at Debian's perl policy.
Debian installs everything into the vendor directories.  So the first
step would be to have the Gentoo perl ebuild specify vendor
directories.  Secondly, a newer version of MakeMaker would probably
need to be included in the core perl build (as of version 5.90,
vanilla MakeMaker seems to have included the Debian vendor
extensions).  Third, "INSTALLDIRS=vendor" would need to somehow be
added to the "perl Makefile.PL" command in perl-module.eclass.

I will attempt to do this locally, and would be interested in hearing
any suggestions or comments on this proposal.

-- 
Robert Coie <rac@apropos.co.jp>
Implementor, Apropos Ltd.