I don't know what prove is.

Don't feel bad... I had never heard of it either until now. (Thanks, jimk!)

Luckily, you can do "perldoc prove", and read all about it. It will probably involve using your command-line shell to go into the ".cpan/build" directory being used by your cpan config (this is typically in your home directory), and from there into the subdir for the module in question; the test scripts are there in a subdir called "t", and you'll run "prove" on those.

update: FWIW, I was able to install XML::LibXML just now on osx 10.4.4 with perl 5.8.6; I didn't get any of those "dubious" reports, let alone any deaths during testing. (There was this interesting comment: 

running xml2-config...untested
WARNING!
The installed version of libxml2 was not tested with this version of X
+ML::LibXML.

    XML::LibXML may fail building or some tests may not pass.
    Expect strange errors and unstable scripts.

    Check the README file for more informations

[download]
but nothing of that sort seems to have happened, and the warning never appeared again on a subsequent run of xml2-config.)

Sometimes, when I've had trouble with installations via "perl -MCPAN -e shell", I've been able to work it out by going back to the unix shell, going into the directory under .cpan where the module package was unpacked, and mucking around manually with "make clean; perl Makefile.PL; make; make test". If any tests fail, look in the "t" subdir to find those tests, and step through them if need be. If they seem unrelated to my intended use of the module, I go ahead and do "make install" anyway; if they're important, I try to get the appropriate details to the module maintainer.

One other point: my install involved a few dependencies -- other modules that I didn't have yet that XML::LibXML needed. These went fine too, but have you checked whether these modules are present and working correctly: XML::LibXML and XML::LibXML::Common.

In reply to Re^3: XML::LibXSLT on OS X install problem by graff
in thread XML::LibXSLT on OS X install problem by alienhuman

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