in reply to Customary Perl setup on Apple Mac OS X?

I think Fink is... not so hot. I had more problems with it than I ever did learning to compile stuff from source. Fink came about, IIRC, during the Public Beta, when installing stuff yourself was for sysadmins and masochists (I spent two miserable weeks getting modperl/apache running on the PB). OS X is not like that anymore so Fink is just another level of code management to the things you want; you might have to wait a long time for a version bump you want. Even for special stuff like image libs, there are good instructions to be found via Google.

Don't forget you have to install all the dev tools; last I checked they weren't in by default. They are one one of the system disks, probably, and can be downloaded from Apple if not. That gives you gcc and other goodies. Then it's just a matter of running cpan from the shell and switching to cpanp from there if you prefer. I recommend not running your box as root so you'll have to sudo cpan to install stuff and sudo make install if you're doing stuff outside the CPAN shell. It's a couple extra steps but it makes it much less likely you'll hose your installation, or worse.

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Re^2: Customary Perl setup on Apple Mac OS X?
by Anonymous Monk on Aug 05, 2008 at 05:48 UTC
    OS X is not like that anymore so Fink is just another level of code management to the things you want

    So, when building your own software, where do you install to? That is to say, what do you use for your "--prefix" when you "./configure" it?

    Then it's just a matter of running cpan from the shell and switching to cpanp from there if you prefer.

    Into which directory will modules be installed using that method?

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      The great thing is I don't know the answer and I don't have to care. It just works. I have 5.10 on this thing. I left the default install in place and just made /usr/bin/perl point to my new perl. The perl installation walks you through that question/setting. 

      moo@cow[50]~>sl /usr/bin/perl
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  25 Mar 23 10:53 /usr/bin/perl@ -> /usr/loc
+al/bin/perl5.10.0

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      I can check various critters with perldoc -l but I've never once had to set up anything special for paths except the symlink for the new perl. That's the joy of root. If you don't do it as root, there are some great posts here about local CPAN installs. Here are a couple of examples of locations on this box but I had no idea where they'd be before checking-

      moo@cow[51]~>pd -l Storable
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0/darwin-2level/Storable.pm
moo@cow[52]~>pd -l Catalyst
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/Catalyst.pm

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        I'm timid about messing with my mac's system files, so I've "opted" for a local, non-root install of my cpan library. I'd like to update to 5.10 however. Is there no reason to be concerned about symlinking to a local perl install? What is the best alternative to a symlink?
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