linux modules cpan and things not found

wolis has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks,

For the first time in my life I have to install modules under linux (I have had no problems with Windows PPM)

I searched and found 128077 some information here about using CPAN and I have sucessfully installed a couple of modules - so far so good.

Now I try installing XML::DOM and a whole bunch of dependencies arise which I answer 'yes'. However something is not quite right and it fails on the test saying is can't locate XML/parser.pm in @INC.

No probs.. I try installing that package:

Running install for module XML::Parser
Running make for M/MS/MSERGEANT/XML-Parser-2.34.tar.gz
  Is already unwrapped into directory /root/.cpan/build/XML-Parser-2.3
+4
  Has already been processed within this session
Running make test
  Can't test without successful make
Running make install
  make had returned bad status, install seems impossible
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Now one wise person said that:
2. Unfortunately, many CPAN authors are still not used to -- or don't know about -- setting PREREQ_PM in Makefile.PL. So be prepared to get the "Can't locate foo/bar.pm in @INC" error while running make test.

Can anyone tell me how I can prepare myself for this?

A) Should I try and find the author of the dependant module and ask for a sollution?

B) Is there a way of finding out exactly what went wrong?

C) Could it be my version of Perl - in which case I would need to updated it (how I dont know yet)

D) Is the test irrelevent and somehow 'forcing' it will suffice?

If you can answer any of these that would be a great help.

PS Thanks,

 ___
/\__\ "What is the world coming to?"
\/__/ www.wolispace.com
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Re: linux modules cpan and things not found
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Aug 10, 2004 at 03:59 UTC

I bet you don't have a modern version of expat installed. Matt certainly knows what he's doing to bundle modules, but there's not much XML::Parser can do if you don't have a C library installed.

[reply]

Re: linux modules cpan and things not found
by tachyon (Chancellor) on Aug 10, 2004 at 04:09 UTC

Although you mention reading A Guide To Installing Modules you don't seem to have tried anything outlined there.

CPAN and PPM are convenience tools. They are fine when they work, but they don't always do the job. The standard way to install software on *nix is:

cd /usr/src (this is the standard location for source code)
wget http://some.site.com/blah/software-1.01.tar.gz (we need to get th
+e tarball)
tar xzf software.tar.gz  (ungzip and untar it)
cd software-1.01  (now go to the dir)
perl Makefile.PL (./configure for most C code)
make  (compile)
make test (test)
make install (install ;-)
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Give it a go. You will have to download dependencies and install them but all up it should be both educational and very useful to your Linux knowledge base as you will be able to escape RPM as well.

As chromatic notes the likely issue is that XML::Parser uses the expat library (it is a wrapper on top). I needed to update expat it so following the steps above......