Esteemed monks,

At work I have a full, up-to-date Perl-running version of Panther, Mac OS X 3.

My home machine, not so much, as it's older and slower and short on space.

Yesterday I tried to install HTML::Template on it.

Now, even the out-of-the-box install of Panther has Perl 5.8.1, and will run CPAN. But CPAN fails to install HTML::Template with error message "make had returned bad status, install seems impossible".

So I go to try the install using "make", "make test" and so on.

I don't have "make".

I've never really thought about this before, but I don't even know what "make" is and I have no idea what to do about the fact that it seems to be missing.

Apple's answer is that I should download or obtain the "Developer Tools" CD and install its contents.

I know from experience that will install tons of stuff I don't understand and will never use. See lack of HD space above.

I guess I have a few questions, answers to any of which will be welcome.

• What exactly is "make" and could I just install it by itself?
• What kind of weird-ass system pre-installs Perl and CPAN but not "make"?
• Can I safely just copy HTML::Template the text file into the right "lib" directory and not "make" it at all?
• What about dependencies?
• Is there a website somewhere which examines what's on that enormous Developer Tools CD and what can be skipped if you just want Perl, but not other kinds of development tool?

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