Weak references error when installing Test::MockObject

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

Because I'm on the Perl.com newsletter mailing list, I learned recently about chromatic's fascinating series on Refactoring the Everything Engine. I was particularly intrigued with Test::MockObject because it addressed a weakness of one of my current development situations, that of being unable to test a web application in a controlled manner. (This is a whole other can of worms .. I'm trying to stay on topic here.)

So, all enthused, I went over to my FC4 test system and went to install Test::MockObject, only to see it fail as follows:

Running make test
PERL_DL_NONLAZY=1 /usr/bin/perl "-MExtUtils::Command::MM" "-e" "test_h
+arness(0, 'blib/lib', 'blib/arch')" t/*.t
t/base............NOK 1#     Failed test (t/base.t at line 8)         
+       
#     Tried to use 'Test::MockObject'.
#     Error:  Weak references are not implemented in the version of pe
+rl at /root/.cpan/build/Test-MockObject-1.06/b
lib/lib/Test/MockObject.pm line 9
# BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /root/.cpan/build/Test-MockObje
+ct-1.06/blib/lib/Test/MockObject.pm line 9.
# Compilation failed in require at (eval 1) line 2.
...
[download]

I have done some research, and it's been suggested that Red Hat in general has this kind of problem. I'm using Perl 5.8.6, and I did do a yum -y update a week or two ago, so I believe things are up to date.

Thoughts?

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

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Re: Weak references error when installing Test::MockObject by gellyfish (Monsignor) on Apr 21, 2006 at 14:27 UTC
You have Scalar::Util installed but it is either not the right version or it does not have the XS parts required for the `weaken` function to work, you may find this if you have a preinstalled perl for instance. Reinstall Scalar::Util and everything will be fine. /J\	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Weak references error when installing Test::MockObject by talexb (Chancellor) on Apr 21, 2006 at 14:44 UTC
Thanks, that worked fine. I'm a little surprised that `cpan -f -i Scalar::Util` [download] didn't do what I wanted, so I had to run the CPAN shell `[root@carbon ~]# cpan cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.7601) ReadLine support enabled cpan> force install Scalar::Util ...` [download] to actually get it to do what I wanted. After that, Test::MockObject installed fine. Thanks a bunch! Alex / talexb / Toronto "Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Weak references error when installing Test::MockObject by chromatic (Archbishop) on Apr 21, 2006 at 17:27 UTC
I've seen that problem in other situations where you have an older version of Scalar::Util in `@INC` -- not the wrong version, just an older version than half of the code expects. It's an XS module, so there's a Perl part and a compiled part. When they get out of sync, weird things happen.	[reply] [d/l]