kcott has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
G'day Monks,
I'm looking at changing to a Mac environment and I'm wondering if there's any major Perl-related gotchas I should be aware of.
Looking at Apple's current offerings, I expect to be purchasing a Mac Pro with OS X Lion. I have no experience with Mac OS X (see Background below for other details).
Being new to the Mac world, my biggest problem is probably not knowing what questions to ask. Here's a non-exhaustive list:
- In order to build perl/modules, it seems I need to first install Developer Tools (following advice found in Installing make on mac LION osx). Anything else?
- Assuming the previous point is resolved, are there any issues with CPAN or related tools (e.g. cpan, cpanp, etc.)?
- Are there any major groups of modules that are not intended to work in a Mac environment? For instance, I'd guess anything in the Win32:: namespace won't work; but I could be wrong.
- I note there's quite a few Mac:: modules on CPAN. Any advice on these?
- Do I need to know anything specific about things like forking, using threads and so on?
I've had a look at OS X Lion Technical Specifications: Perl is only mentioned by name; the version is not given; no further links are provided.
Background: If it helps with your response, my current home setup is WinXP (Strawberry Perl 5.12.0) with Cygwin (Perl 5.12.0 built from source); I've used Perl commercially in a variety of UNIX-based environments (Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and others); I have substantial Perl experience (over 15 years).
-- Ken