You could try to build a shared version, as opposed to it picking up the system version. This has the advantage that it is isolated from the system version so will not be affected by system updates, but with the caveat that it will not benefit from updates.

Shared builds can be forced using an environment variable, set before you build the makefile. This is documented at https://metacpan.org/pod/Alien::Build#ALIEN_INSTALL_TYPE.

Note that there are failures listed for darwin (mac) in cpan testers: http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Alien-Libxml2+0.09. I have not looked closely at the reasons, but they might be relevant to your case.

In reply to Re: Alien::Libxml2 cannot find the latest libxml2 by swl
in thread Alien::Libxml2 cannot find the latest libxml2 by PhilipS

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.