To Depend Or Not To Depend
When starting an application, I always strive to reduce dependencies as much as possible, especially if I know that there's some way that does not take me too much time to go.
It turns out that I chose one of the worst possible examples. Check out the comments below and - more importantly - check out lib documentation!
This happens when I use lib, for example to add ../lib to @INC.
For my own stuff I usually head towards Path::Class:
use Path::Class qw( file );
use lib file(__FILE__)->parent()->parent()->subdir('lib')->stringify();
but when I want to reduce dependencies I revert to File::Spec::Functions (which is CORE since perl 5.5.4 and now part of PathTools):
use File::Spec::Functions qw( splitpath splitdir catdir catpath );
my $path;
BEGIN {
my ($volume, $directories) = splitpath(__FILE__);
my @dirs = splitdir($directories);
push @dirs, qw( .. lib ); # ../lib - naive but effective
$path = catpath($volume, catdir(@dirs));
}
use lib $path;
Alas, how I miss the Path::Class solution!
Note that $path in 'use lib $path;' must use Unix filepaths (see lib.pm documentation). This means joining with '/' as a directory separator.
Did you test your solution on MS Windows or MacOS X?
BTW, that is what I use
use File::Spec; # __DIR__ is taken from Dir::Self __DIR__ fragment sub __DIR__ () { File::Spec->rel2abs(join '', (File::Spec->splitpath(__FILE__))[0, 1]); } use lib __DIR__ . '/lib';How about
use FindBin qw($Bin);
use lib "$Bin/../lib";
?
Danger! FindBin considered harmful.
I prefer to structure my perl scripts as a library with a thin "bin" wrapper, and then build/install using Dist::Zilla (or Module::Build, or ExtUtils::MakeMaker). Doing it this way make it so that I never have to resort to crazy File::Spec hacks, and I get other benefits like test-driven development with "prove -l -v t" and the potential to release to CPAN one day
D'oh you are all right! The funny thing is that I *knew* about UNIX filepaths... just forgot it! Thank you all very much indeed, especially jnareb.openid.pl for putting me on the right track!