in reply to OT, sort of: "make" on OSX

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

You should have a copy of the Developer CD with your copy of Mac OS X. You do have a legal copy of Mac OS X don't you :-)

What exactly is "make" and could I just install it by itself?

It's the build system usually used for C/C++ code. It's used to make sure stuff is compiled in the right order, linked, installed, etc.

You can install it by itself. To do that you'll need a C compiler. Guess what else is on the Developer CD :-)

What kind of weird-ass system pre-installs Perl and CPAN but not "make"?

Not all people who use Perl need CPAN. Perl is used within Mac OS X itself in various places so that's one of the reasons it comes installed by default.

All the developer tools (make, gcc, etc.) take up a fair amount of space. For the vast majority of Mac OS X users who are not developers it's not needed.

Can I safely just copy HTML::Template the text file into the right "lib" directory and not "make" it at all?

HTML::Template is a pure perl module so that should work fine.

What about dependencies?

If you take a look at its Makefile.PL you'll see it depends on File::Spec and Carp which are both core in 5.8.1 so you shouldn't have any problems.

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?

If you look at the Developer CD there are some options to only do a partial install. If you exclude the documentation and examples it should save you a large chunk of space.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: OT, sort of: "make" on OSX
by Cody Pendant (Prior) on May 03, 2004 at 21:14 UTC

    Thanks a lot. Everything you say makes sense, but one nagging doubt.

    What is CPAN going to do with the modules it downloads, if it can't "make" them? Isn't that why the install failed? So what use is CPAN without "make"? I guess it just came with the standard Perl maybe?


    ($_='kkvvttuubbooppuuiiffssqqffssmmiibbddllffss')
    =~y~b-v~a-z~s; print
[reply]
      What is CPAN going to do with the modules it downloads, if it can't "make" them? Isn't that why the install failed? So what use is CPAN without "make"? I guess it just came with the standard Perl maybe?

      It's not actually CPAN that is using make, but the module distribution that it downloads.

      The reason that you need make even for pure perl distributions is that the most common mechanism for packaging up modules ExtUtils::MakeMaker offloads a lot of its work to make.

      In hindsight this decision was probably a mistake. One of the reasons its problematic is that several platforms don't come with make installed by default (e.g. Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Windows).

      The more modern Module::Build does away with the dependency on make. Unfortunately this doesn't help until more modules support M::B.

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      'make' is part of a standard development environment and yes OSs without 'make' installed by default make installing modules a pain in the neck.
[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom