Yesterday evening I tested the program I'm working on, built with Perl/Tk on a SuSE 6.4 laptop. Up till the last time I tested a version on that machine, everything worked fine. Now it crashed. And not even with a neat little perl errormessage, but with a plain 'segmentation fault'. First thing I thought was checking the version of Perl on all of my machines (which was 5.005_03), and checking the version of Tk. This was a probable source of the problem. My development machine had 800.022, the SuSE 6.4 machine had 800.014. "Bingo!" I thought. I started  perl -MCPAN -e'shell', did a re-install of Tk, and left the machine alone for a while (downloading and compiling all Tk stuff takes a while).

When I got back, I quickly looked at the screen, saw something that looked like 'successfully', so I presumed everything was OK. I exited the CPAN shell, tried to run the program again, but still the same error.
I went to my Windows desktop machine with Activestate Perl, and also Tk 800.022 installed, ran the program and it worked fine there too (wonderful! write once run anywhere...err...wasn't that a slogun of another language....?? ). Anyway. The error had to be on the SuSE 6.4 testmachine.

After debugging a whole lot, which didn't lead to any results, I decided to check the Tk version once more. I didn't know why I did, but I got frustrated, and then you try everything you've tried before. 800.014 it said. What? But I just installed 800.022! Back to the builddirectory of Tk, I typed make install. At the end it indeed said something like 'successfully' ,but it also said that 'if I wanted to remove "those" files I had to run make install UNINST=1'.Hmm...something told me that the make install didn't update my files, but just added the non-existing ones. I ran make install UNINST=1 and indeed, after that my program worked fine.

I rethought everyting I went through, and left myself with only one question. When I want to upgrade any package, will it always have to be installed like this, or is it possible to really upgrade the files from the CPAN shell? I used CPAN.pm 1.58 (I know, 1.59 is available).

Jouke Visser, Perl 'Adept'

In reply to upgrading Tk && CPAN.pm by Jouke

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