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Perl 5.8.0 & dyld: perl Undefined symbols
Authored by: lrivers on May 13, '03 03:28:39PM

It would be great if it were easier to update and maintain perl on Mac OS X, and adding fink to the mix certainly doesn't help.

Sherm's response is also, in it's way, correct but it does not address the problems of the casual or beginner perl delver.

He says:
With all due respect, the best solution is pre-emptive: Delve into the Perl documentation until you're thoroughly familiar with Perl's directory layout and the effects of the PERL5LIB variable. Then, plan your installation before entering a single shell command. Installing Perl is *not* a simple task, and trying to proceed as if it is (or should be) quite often results in problems such as you describe.

OK, why shouldn't it be easy? Why shouldn't it have better error messages? Why is it so hard to find out what the problem is when this class of error shows up? I'm no dewey-eyed newbie, but I have had lots of problems getting various perl modules to work with various combinations of perl, fink, darwinports, PostgreSQL (try compiling DBD::pg without compiling everything else first to encounter similar problems).

I appreciate what Aaron Faby provides and respect his and Sherm's obvious knowledge (no doubt hard won). Nobody is born with the perl docs as instinct...

Perl comes on every Mac OS X box, and it should work with CPAN, fink, darwinports and so forth without being a complete horrorshow for the intermediate geek.



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