I don't know what prove is. I'm using cpan to install the modules, and the only options I see are "get, make, test, install, clean". In fact, my system doesn't seem to have anything called prove installed.

Can you explain? I'm quite teh n00b at this sort of thing, I'm afraid.

AH

Using perl 5.8.1-RC3 unless otherwise noted.
Apache/1.3.33 (Darwin) unless otherwise noted.
Mac OS X 10.3.9 unless otherwise noted.
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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
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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.

Thanks for the information, graff, much appreciated.

It turns out that 'perldoc prove' doesn't return any documentation. Is it part of Test::Harness? I've got version 2.29 of Test::Harness, but I notice that the version on CPAN is 2.56.

I do have XML::LibXML and XML::LibXML::Common installed (1.58 and 0.13 respectively), so hopefully the dependencies are satisfied there.

I took your advice and descended into .cpan/build/XML-LibXSLT-1.58/ and ran 'make clean'. Here's the output:

make: *** No rule to make target `clean'.  Stop.
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I also decided to run 'perl Makefile.PL'. Here's the output:

running xslt-config... ok
looking for -lxslt... no
libxslt not found
Try setting LIBS and INC values on the command line
Or get libxslt and libxml2 from 
  http://www.libxml.org/
If you install via RPMs, make sure you also install the -devel
RPMs, as this is where the headers (.h files) are.
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I had to do something similar for LibXML, using a cpan config option called 'makepl_arg', but I tried using the same args and it didn't work (the error message said something like 'unknown argument').

I know where libxslt is installed (fink puts it in a non-standard place, apparently), so if I can figure out what arguments to pass Makefile.PL (and how), I think I can get this working.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

AH

----------

Using perl 5.8.1-RC3 unless otherwise noted.
Apache/1.3.33 (Darwin) unless otherwise noted.
Mac OS X 10.3.9 unless otherwise noted.
[download]