[staf-devel] Tidying up lang/perl a bit

[Eric S. <ems...@fc...>]

So I took it upon myself to tidy up the lang/perl directory, and I'm
mostly done with it.  What I did was to take the existing code and
reformat it to work with Perl's ExtUtils::MakeMaker system.  This
creates a set of files with a Makefile.PL file.  This Makefile.PL file
is essentially a Perl program that creates a Makefile that you can
then run.  

The disadvantage, of course, is that it creates another Makefile.  I
have read the "recursive makefiles considered harmful" paper, and I
more or less agree with most of the principles of it.  However, in
this case, I think the benefits far outweigh the problems, and several
of the problems are quite mitigate-able, since the Makefile.PL is a
Perl program, after all.

The benefits are: Perl creates your Makefile, so it already knows
where to install binary and arch-independent extensions to itself.
You, as a Perl extension author, shouldn't need to care about all that
stuff-- just ask Perl to install for you, and It Just Works(tm).

Perl also handles all the overhead of creating C function prototypes
and all the Perl arguments translation for you, so you can concentrate
on writing code instead of doing stuff like all that "#ifdef PERL5_6"
and STAF_PERL_API_PROLOGUE, and so on.  I was able to reduce
PLSTAF_Register from 49 lines to 28, by letting Perl handle that sort
of thing.

HOWEVER, there's a catch-- a weirdness that I don't quite get.  I was
able to compile and install the PLSTAF binary and Perl modules (oh,
and I recast the PLSTAF.pm module to use prototypes, which negates the
need for a lot of the manual args-checking you were doing).  If I run
STAF.pl, as-is, it hangs at STAF::Register.  If I just add the line 

else { print ""; }

to the "if ($rc != 0)" statement, then everything works correctly.
Much weirdness.

I've attached my .tar.gz file (it's < 7k); if anybody can take a look
at what I've done and figure out why adding the empty print statement
is making it work (and more importantly, how to fix that), that would
be great.

-=Eric