perl and relocating its installation

While setting up our development system and source control, I'm taking the philosophy that all tools are to be checked into source control, not installed on individual machines; in that way a developer's tools are never out of date. Unfortunately some tools don't like this approach, they like to hard-code or "relocate" their position during installation.

One of those is perl.

This link explains a bit how ActivateState relocates perl on install.

What happens is that the @INC path must be embedded in the perl executable on
Unix platforms, or so they claim. When install.sh is run, it calls reloc_perl,
which uses an ActiveState perl module Relocate which then uses this trick to
replace things like
/tmp/.TheInstallScriptWasNotRunTheInstallScriptWasNotRunTheInstallScriptWasNotRun-perl/lib/5.8.0
with the appropriate path. Unfortunately, when I first tried this, the path just happens to be my home directory where I downloaded it.

By the way, there is only 0x80 (128) bytes of space to put the path in, so there is a limit to what location it can be relocated into.

So, the procedure I used to get an ActivePerl that works on anyone's machine no matter where their source directory is mapped to their file system:

• Installed ActiveState Perl normally, into a place such as your home directory: in my case this was /home/jared.oberhaus/p4/tools/linux/ActivePerl-5.8.3.809
• Found all instance of text and binary files under the installation directory that contain /home/jared.oberhaus and replaced them with the original files from the install tar. The original files still have encoded strings such as/tmp/.TheInstallScriptWasNotRunTheInstallScriptWasNotRunTheInstallScriptWasNotRun-perl/lib/5.8.0 inside them.
• Submitted these files to source control as-is.
• Modified ActiveState's install.sh by adding to it (not removing the original install procedures). First it links the magic /tmp path to the file location where the source control version is mapped. This is controlled by detecting where the install script exists and processing that. When reloc_perl executes it will copy everything into /home/user/p4/tools/linux/perl-5.8.3 and at the same time replace the magic /tmp string with the correct location.