From mid-June to early November, I have spent 320 more hours working on package management. After having worked on the bootstrap support in HaikuPorter (which Ingo has already mentioned in his blog entry), I have spent some time reworking the way how Perl and Pythong organize their modules: Scripting languages with module support usually expect to be able to build modules from source and install them somewhere into the hierarchy of the scripting language. In our case, they can no longer just put the built (site-specific) modules into the “standard” folder, as that one is read-only. So the configuration of Perl and Python had to be changed, such that modules built from source are being installed correctly into a writable folder (in the non-packaged hierarchy). Perl already supports the notion of a vendor-modules folder, where packaged Perl modules will be installed (an example of such a beast are the perl modules contained in the git package). That idea has been extended to Python (such that it will automatically pick up the python modules provided by the mercurial package). Separating packaged modules from local (built from source) modules is an idea that should be followed by all (not only scripting) languages ported to Haiku. The updated perl, python, git, mercurial and scons packages that are the result from that work have not yet been published, but I will do that during the next couple of days.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/zooey/2013-11-10_end_package_management_contract/