Moving to a Mac... which Perl?

We’ll after neglecting this blog for quite some time, I’m now back. I had to swap my laptop during the summer, and I decided to give one of the MacBook Pros a try. So I’ll be adding Perl on the Mac and the Mac in general to the topics covered here. My first dilemma with the new Mac was which perl to use.

• Leopard only had 5.8 installed, and I’ve been hooked on 5.10 for a while now. (Snow Leopard has added 5.10, but by the time I got the upgrade I was commited to the ideal of keeping the system perl separate from my development perl.)

• Having come from Arch Linux, I stumbled upon and really liked Arch OS/X. Unfortunately, it appears that it isn’t as well tested as MacPorts. In order to build any Perl modules that us XS with the Arch OS/X perl, I needed to use:

  $ perl Makefile.PL \
      LDDLFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc \
               -bundle -undefined dynamic_lookup -L/usr/local/lib" \
      LDFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc -L/usr/local/lib" \
      CCFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc -g -pipe \
               -fno-common -DPERL_DARWIN -fno-strict-aliasing \
               -I/usr/local/include -I." \
      OPTIMIZE="-Os"

  Ummm… I don’t think so! While I created an bash alias for it, cpan/cpanp where requiring constant tweaks. I assume I could have exported those variable from my bashrc, but I would rather avoid global changes like that.

• Next I tried compiling my own perl. I ended up doing it several times as I learned where to put it, and realized I had forgotten to enable things like threads. This really seems to be the best way to go, but I would rather someone else keep up with security patches, new versions, etc.

• So finally I tried MacPorts. So far so good. I have had trouble remembering to check the variants (port variants <port-file>), but otherwise thumbs up.

One thing I realized that I want, is a record of all the ports that I have installed (not a list of all the installed ports, just those that I had purposely installed). So, I wrote a short bash script that I stuck in ~/bin/port to keep a log:

#!/bin/bash

case "$1" in
  install|uninstall|upgrade|activate )
      echo "`date` $@" >> ~/.macports.log
      ;;
  *)
esac

/opt/local/bin/port $@

Now anytime I run port install perl5.10 +shared +threads it is added to a log file. Rebuilding the system should be a snap. (I’m sure I could have gotten this by grepping for sudo and port install from the /var/log/system.log* files, but I like having it all in one place and not worrying about log files being rotated out.)

One other tweak I need to make, was for CPANPLUS. I wanted to be able to install modules in either the system perl (by running /usr/bin/cpanp) or the MacPort perl (/opt/local/bin/cpanp), but both of those read my user config file (~/.cpanplus/lib/CPANPLUS/Config/User.pm) which need a full path for perlwrapper => '/usr/bin/cpanp-run-perl'. So I moved just that part of the config to the system config file by runnning the following in each cpanp:

$ s save system
$ s edit system

Then removing everything but the perlwrapper configuration. And finally taking the perlwrapper configuration out of my User.pm file. One other thing I needed to do to make 5.10 the default perl. MacPort defaults to perl5.8, but the following took care of that:

$ cd /opt/local/bin
$ sudo mv perl perl.bak
$ sudo cp perl-5.10 perl
# make cpanp -> cpanp-5.10, etc.
$ for i in *-5.10 ; do x=${i%%-5.10} ;  sudo mv $x $x-5.8 ; sudo ln -s $i $x ; done 

I see Python has a python_select port-file. Maybe we need something like that for Perl.