Branch updates

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sat, Jan 05, 2013 at 09:43:58AM -0600, Reini Urban wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 6:19 AM, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 04, 2013 at 05:22:05PM -0600, Reini Urban wrote:
> >> Moved "." in the library search paths from the beginning to the end.
> >> - low impact expected:
> >
> > Ouch.  This may actually have a very high impact on developers at
> > least, if not others.
> >
> The bug report came from nqp/perl6, see
> https://github.com/parrot/parrot/issues/368
> There were two camps, one to remove it at all, one to move . to the end.

Noted.

> With perl6 and nqp you are using installed parrots only.
> So adding . to the front at build-time would not help you.

It's not just Parrot's libraries that are at issue here, though --
both Rakudo and NQP build their own dynamically loaded libraries.
At build time those newly-built libraries are in (or are relative to) 
the current directory, but there may also be versions of those 
libraries in the installed parrot tree which would be (incorrectly)
found first.

As an example, consider nqp_group.o which is created during nqp's
build process; there will also be a copy in the Parrot install tree.
If the install tree takes priority, there can be obscure build problems.

I'm not necessarily asking for things to be reverted; I'm just pointing
out that the impact may not be quite as low as described.

Pm