Item1195: Some extensions aren't installable as extender.pl can't decide where they come from

After "fixing" some code on extender.pl, this old bug, introduced by distro:caa811542639, came back to light.

The symptoms are that the configure scripts downloads the installer, but does not run it. It's because of:

http://trac.foswiki.org/browser/trunk/core/tools/extender.pl?rev=2664#L845

Line 846, the $1 is what was successfully matched the last time a successful match occured, which should be something like the filename.

In other words, it's garbage.

The idea here is that it can either be Foswiki of TWiki, but how can we know which?

-- OlivierRaginel - 03 Mar 2009

If a module cited in DEPENDENCIES lacks a Foswiki or TWiki prefix, then there is no way to know what namespace it belongs to. I would either default it to Foswiki:: or delete that whole conditional.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 03 Mar 2009

Agreed. I'll set this to Foswiki:: by default. The idea here in fact is just to try and guess if a module is already installed, and if it is, check its version number.

The problem I saw is that this code is used not for dependencies, but for the module we're installing. Therefore it's inside the _installer perl script that it's calling install, thus _install, thus this piece of code. And from what I could see, most modules just use their names, not full names.

Maybe it's time to "fix" BuildContrib too, so that one of the 2 parameters passed is the full name of the module?

-- OlivierRaginel - 03 Mar 2009