I have experienced failed compilations of many modules lately on both Mac OSX Panther and Fedora Core 1 (DBD::mysql, HTML::Mason, mod_perl and others)

I'm speculating here, but often when modules won't compile, especially non-pure-Perl modules, the problem is that you don't have all the development packages installed. For example, to install mod_perl you need all the Apache-related development packages, and to install DBD::mysql you need the MySQL-related development packages. As a general rule, if you intend to install any software that doesn't come with your distribution, you should install all of the development packages that do come with it. This is very likely to be your problem under Fedora. I don't know as much about OS X, but it may be related there too.

Perl was my first server-side scripting language and still my favourite. I just wish I didn't have to deal with CPAN's shortcomings. What a waste.

IMO, the greatest problem with the CPAN is that many of the modules are not Pure-perl and so they require a lot of extra things besides just Perl in order to install. In some cases this is due to limitations in Perl5; hopefully this situation will improve with Perl6. For now, though, the best advice I can offer is to install the development packages that come with your distribution. I find it's easiest to just install _all_ of them indiscrimanently, so I don't have to think about which ones I need. Using that approach, CPAN.pm works pretty well, although I've occasionally had to force install (notably, with Taint.pm) or install some dependency that for some reason CPAN.pm didn't notice was a dependency (e.g., when trying to install DateTime::Format::Mail just now I had to install Storable first, since CPAN.pm didn't realize that was needed).

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In reply to Re: Module compilation hell by jonadab
in thread Module compilation hell by Anonymous Monk

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