In the imortal words of the single greatest character in all media, in all history, Jar Jar Binks: My give up.

FFI::Platypus was sagely recommended here before. I read the doc and watched the youtube talks; read a few of the example scripts and tests. I am really excited to try it.

I cannot even get the most simplistic lib check—on the libraries I’m interested in using—to work. I have tried about 100 minor variations of this basic formula (including paths all over my drive and variations and guesses on lib names and adding recurse => 1) to no avail.

Standard library

perl -MFFI::CheckLib -E 'say "OK" if find_lib_or_exit lib => "archive"
+'
OK
[download]

DCMTK library

# Tried MANY variations on this theme with lib_path and recurse too.
perl -MFFI::CheckLib -E 'find_lib_or_exit lib => "dcmdata"'
library not found: dcmdata at -e line 1.
[download]

DCMTK is definitely installed on my system; as a binary, I think, I don’t remember building/installing it. I can find the libraries manually, I think. I tried using their various paths. The tools are in the regular $PATH, e.g. /usr/local/bin/dcmodify. The packages I am interested in wrapping up and using in Perl include those here DCMTK Documentation.

What am I doing wrong? Surely something, I hope something, simple.

Solved

The simple problem—finding the library—is solved with a local tweak thanks to swl pointing out the platform specific regex. They use the extension “a.”

find /usr/local/lib | ack dcmdata
/usr/local/lib/libdcmdata.a
[download]

# Change in FFI::CheckLib.
  push @$pattern, qr{^lib(.*?)(?:\.([0-9]+(?:\.[0-9]+)*))?\.(?:dylib|b
+undle|a)$}; # add "a"
[download]

perl -MFFI::CheckLib -E 'say "OK" if find_lib_or_exit lib => "dcmdata"
+'
OK
[download]