2006-09-05 Perl Installation

Argh. I’m too stupid. I have Mac OS 10.4 on my desktop, and a working Perl installation mess on my Laptop. The mess is that there’s the Perl Apple shipped, and there’s the DarwinPorts Perl in _opt_local.

=> DarwinPorts

Anyway, I install all my modules using CPAN, and it works for me. So I’m trying to cpan XML::Parser but that requires the expat library. which OSX is lacking. So I use port install expat and now I have a libexpat.a in /opt/local/lib. You know where this is going, right?

So the OSX gcc still doesn’t know about expat:

gcc -lexpat
/usr/bin/ld: can't locate file for: -lexpat
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

I should use -L to add the directory to the search path. But do I do that so that the CPAN shell will pick it up? It must be some kind of environment variable, and I cannot figure it out.

It’s not a real problem. I can develop on my laptop. But I’d love to understand!! Grrr. This most boring of all problems is wasting hours of my time.

The strange thing is that on my laptop, this problem is not solved either. gcc -lexpat reports the same error. And yet I can “use XML::Parse" in my Perl programs. My guess is that I have a total parallel installation of Perl: which perl → /opt/local/bin/perl. And somehow that Perl knows about the right directories.

We hatesss it, my preciousss!!

​#Software ​#Perl

Comments

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Maybe try to add that directory somewhere around ld.so.conf or ld.so.conf.d and run ldconf as root after that. Helps on Linux.

– RadomirDopieralski 2006-09-05 23:32 UTC

=> RadomirDopieralski

Good idea. This being OSX, however, I am out of luck. I can’t find it. Probably some XML file somewhere in /System/Library/*/*.plist or something like that.

– Alex Schroeder 2006-09-05 23:42 UTC

=> Alex Schroeder

Setting environment variables like LD_PATH and such helps too...

– RadomirDopieralski 2006-09-06 01:08 UTC

=> RadomirDopieralski

Years have passed, and suddenly I feel the urge to install XML::RSS on my Mac OS 10.4 again – which requires XML::Parser – which still won’t compile. Searching my own blog, I find that I wasn’t able to solve the problem ages ago. Noooo!

– Alex Schroeder 2008-07-15 08:56 UTC

=> Alex Schroeder