Request for review: perl-Want

[Ville Skyttä]

On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 10:35 -0500, Steven Pritchard wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 01, 2005 at 11:26:36AM +0200, Oliver Falk wrote:
> > Also it suggests the following for make:
> > make %{?_smp_mflags} OPTIMIZE="$RPM_OPT_FLAGS"
> 
> Is it really wise to override the options Perl was compiled with?

Well, there are a few things to consider, off the cuff in no particular
order:

The vast majority of non-noarch packages in the distro, not limited to
Perl module ones, are built so that they honor $RPM_OPT_FLAGS.

If a non-noarch Perl package does not honor $RPM_OPT_FLAGS, --target to
rpmbuild will be completely ignored, and let's say folks explicitly
asking for a i686 package will silently get a i386 one (which presents
itself as an i686 one) when built on i386.

The options have been overridden this way for a long time, and nobody
has reported any related breakage.  (And actually, by default, we're not
even overriding anything, in the default configs we use for all shipped
packages, $RPM_OPT_FLAGS is the same as what Perl would give.  But
that's kind of a coincidence.)

ExtUtils::MakeMaker and Module::Build do provide means for overriding
these options.

> It seems like I've asked this before, but I can't remember the answer.  :)

The above doesn't really still answer that, but rather presents some
food for thought why it might not be a wrong thing to do :)