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CromeDome (4395)

CromeDome
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Hello, I'm MrCromeDome from Perl Monks. [perlmonks.org] See my account there or my home page for more info.

Journal of CromeDome (4395)

Tuesday July 07, 2009
08:04 AM

Question for Mac Users

[ #39243 ]

For those of you using Macs, are you using Perl as it ships with OS X, the Perl MacPort, or are you compiling your own? If you could briefly explain why you use the one you do. I agonize over this every couple of months, and finally decided to sample a larger bit of the community this time around.

Thanks!


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  • I use 5.8.8 as it ships, and have a 5.10.0 that I compiled myself. I've been too lazy to completely roll over to the latter so far.

    • I do the same as the above. I like to have a version of 5.10 to work with and prefer not to mess with the delivered version of perl.

  • I think the advice is similar to other non-Mac platforms that do package management. For Fedora I keep the default Fedora Perl installed but then compile and install my own. I even change the /usr/bin/perl symlink to point to mine so it makes things easier. But I leave everything else alone so it can continue to use the system perl.

  • I compile my own, with $HOME as the prefix. This puts everything in $HOME/bin, $HOME/lib, etc. The biggest problem I've encountered is executing scripts directly uses their shebang, which is usually the system perl. I avoid the problem by running everything with 'perl' specified. Since $HOME/bin is in my PATH first, this executes my custom build. The big win, in my opinion, is I never have to use sudo to rebuild, update, install cpan modules, or really anything.

  • I always compile perl on every machine I use. Just because I prefer to have similar perl everywhere. Thus my macbook runs 5.10 now.

  • I'm running 5.10 on my Macbook; I'll be running it (or the latest version) on pretty much anything from this point on.
  • I'm running 5.8.9 compiled. Because you can't trust what Apple will do during an update.
    Planning on moving to 5.10.1 when it is released, and will replace my 5.8.9 compiled instance with it.

  • Like many others, I prefer to leave the system perl alone. I also like the flattened libdir structure that Aristotle describes here [perl.org]:

    PREFIX=$HOME/perl-5.10 ./Configure -des -Dprefix=$PREFIX -Dinc_version_list=none -Dprivlib=$PREFIX/lib -Darchlib=$PREFIX/archlib -Dsitearch=$PREFIX/archlib -Dsitelib=$PREFIX/lib

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