irvken has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Well, something definitely went drastically wrong for on my first tentative perl steps. So as I felt I made a complete mess of my system ( I couldn't even get perl helloworld.pl to work), i decided to start again.

First I did 
rpm -e --nodeps perl
rpm -e --nodps mod_perl
rpm -e --apache

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which i now realise was a mistake because my xchat client has failed :( So then I dloaded stable.tar.gz for perl-5.8.0 and unpacked in my home dir and then went to read the install doc It says, as you're all probably aware

The basic steps to build and install perl5 on a Unix system
with all the defaults are:

    rm -f config.sh Policy.sh
    sh Configure -de
    make
    make test
    make install

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 however there are no config.sh or Policy.sh files in the unpacked archive, only config_h.SH and policy_h.SH, does it mean these?

and what are the -de flags for on configure

Title edit by tye

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Starting again installing Perl
by PodMaster (Abbot) on May 02, 2003 at 08:08 UTC
    only config_h.SH and policy_h.SH, does it mean these?
    No. If it meant those, it would've said those. It's not really important, but Configure is supposed to generate config.h and policy.sh.
    and what are the -de flags for on configure
    I suggest you continue reading INSTALL and find out (especially the =head2 Common Configure options section).

    MJD says you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!
    I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6x+5.8x. I take requests.
    ** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

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Re: Starting again
by Coplan (Pilgrim) on May 01, 2003 at 16:42 UTC
    What distribution of linux are you using? You should already have perl. I assume you were upgrading? You should've done a rpm upgrade (rpm -uvh) rather than uninstalling and trying to install again. There's a lot that is dependant on perl, so you'll see a lot of things broken.

    At this point, I would grab your distro disk and install the rpm that is on there. Then upgrade from there.

    --Coplan

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      That was what I was doing when it all went wrong. Unfortunately I don't have the original distro as i gave it away to somone else, and anyway loads of people on scoop and #perl have told me that rh8 perl is "broken" ( for my purposes, setting up scoop) and it's better to get a fresh perl source and recompile it etc. Which strangely enough is what I am now compelled to do. So you can't help then?
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        Well, having force-removed perl, you're probably in a very general bind in that you have a whole bunch of packages that expect perl to be there when it isn't. Is your system irremediably broken? Not necessarily. You can probably reinstall RH's perl, and install your own somewhere else., say, in /usr/local/. That's going to be a chore, because there's a lot of questions you need to know the answer to that you probably won't. A starting point is to figure out what is "broken" vis a vis RH perl and scoop. I believe that scoop runs under mod_perl, and there might be issues with the prerelease of mod_perl RH has shipped since version 8. So it may not be perl as such that needs to be recompiled, only mod_perl (and apache, since RH's apache is v.2.0, and mod_perl 1.x won't run with that). Once you get that part figured out, come back and ask again as a reply here (or to your original message) and I'll do what I can to help you out -- although keep in mind I had better see evidence of a fishing pole (aka research) as I'm willing to help, but not willing to do the work for you =)

        If not P, what? Q maybe?
        "Sidney Morgenbesser"

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[d/l]
Re: Starting again installing Perl
by TVSET (Chaplain) on May 02, 2003 at 16:59 UTC
    Removing perl from RPM-based Linux distribution (like RedHat) is VERY bad idea. 999 chanced out of a 1000 are that you will end up with a broken system. As far as I know, even rpm depends on perl (well, rpm-build actually, but still it's a bad idea). Since you are using "--nodeps" rpm flag, you have even fewer chances to survive. :)

    I'd suggest that the first thing you do is bring perl back from your distribution CDs. Then, if you need a different version, then install it into some other directory (like /usr/local/). You can have several versions of perl installed on the system at the same time.

    Leonid Mamtchenkov aka TVSET

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