Reinstalling perl from scratch on OS X

[dhosek]

I apparently have something messed up in my perl installation (what, I have no idea, but there must be something since some basic CPAN modules fail their tests when I try to install them). Any advice on clearing out the current perl installation and starting over? I'm on OS X 10.4.10

[merlyn]

It's not possible to precisely recreate the Perl on your disk from the publicly available sources. Apple has some proprietary modules installed in the standard distro. So, to really get it back, you'll need to reinstall your O/S.

I agree with another comment in this thread. Don't touch the original install. Install your own in a different path.

[Fletch]

The safest thing to do (on any platform where you don't want to muck with the OS' own perl install) is to recompile your own with a different prefix location (say /usr/local) and make sure your PATH and/or shebang lines find that first. You then always use that version instead and leave the system's alone. Specifically on OS X, consider using macports or fink to install a separate copy.

[marto]

If you can't resolve your module installation issues (are you sure that Perl is broken, and that its not some other configuration issue?), you may want to take a look at Installing Perl 5.8 on Jaguar to give you some hints.

Hope this helps

Martin

[silent11]

I've installed a separate perl using macports and haven't had any problems installing from CPAN. Once macports is installed all you gotta do is sudo port install perl. You can also sudo port search perl to see what perl related software is available to you via ports.

Has anyone else had good/bad experiences with the port system?

[halley]

My only beef with the port system, which is not particular to macports, but to any packaging manager, is how you manage the multiple libraries of available modules. If you use port, you should probably use it for common modules too (and there are many, like p5-www-mechanize).

If it's not on the macports list (and there are many), then it feels ugly to try to use CPAN to manage a second packaging layer on top of that, and not know whether the module you're requesting will end up building a constellation of modules that are unproven on your platform.

The last alternative is to go through the dependency hell yourself in your own local PERLLIB directory, which is only slightly more unsavory and has the same pitfalls.

When I did more development on Red Hat Linux, the same deal applied to their repository, but I got familiar with how to repackage most CPAN modules with cpanflute at the time, so I could at least work with one installation library path. With macports, I'm not familiar with this route: how to make a port file for a CPAN module, so it would install safely in the same tree with other port-installed p5-* modules.

[zer]

which modules are failing

[robot_tourist]

It would help if we knew which modules were failing to install and what the reason is, or at least the reported error messages. I tried installing Tk on my MacBook a couple of months ago and the test failed because I hadn't installed X11. Since I don't do much development on my Mac, I just let it go.

[dhosek]

Well what I've bumped into so far includes Bit::Vector::Overload

CPAN complains about

LWP failed with code[500] message[MIME::Base64 object version 3.05 doe
+s not match bootstrap parameter 3.07]

There are some others that I'm not finding at the moment, but it's been really annoying since they've blocked me from using some other CPAN modules that would make my life much simpler.

[robot_tourist]

OK, I tried to install it at the CPAN prompt by typing install Bit::Vector::Overload. The first thing I saw was something like 'LWP not available, using Net::FTP'. Since we got such different results hopefully some of the other Monks can help you further, but my instinct is that the code[500] is an error message from the server.

As an aside, Bit::Vector::Overload didn't install for me either because of dependencies on other modules I don't have, but the install script generated pages and pages of test messages along the way (mostly all passed), so you'll forgive me if I don't repeat them here.

[Anonymous Monk]

Of course, being a Mac, your computer never shat flames.