I am working on a little project that requires a bit of perl and some database modules. I’m running Leopard, which ships with Perl 5.8.8. That kinda sucks.

So, I tried to work with a binary installer. Which was, for a number of reasons, a failure.

Given my recent experience with virtualenv and Python, I started looking into what’s the state of the art in this area for Perl.

The suggestion from the Perl home page is “perlbrew”. I took it for a spin.

tar zxvf App-perlbrew-0.28.tar.gz
...

selena@lulu:Downloads #553 14:12 :( cd App-perlbrew-0.28
selena@lulu:App-perlbrew-0.28 #554 14:12 :) perl Makefile.PL

Checking if your kit is complete...
Looks good
Warning: prerequisite Devel::PatchPerl 0.26 not found.
Warning: prerequisite File::Path::Tiny 0 not found.
Warning: prerequisite IO::All 0 not found.
Warning: prerequisite Path::Class 0 not found.
Warning: prerequisite Test::Output 0 not found.
Warning: prerequisite Test::Spec 0 not found.
Writing Makefile for App::perlbrew


Hmmm… So I tried to use cpanm to get it going:


selena@lulu:App-perlbrew-0.28 #557 14:13 :( sudo cpanm App::perlbrew
...
Building and testing App-perlbrew-0.28 for App::perlbrew ... FAIL
! Installing App::perlbrew failed. See /Users/selena/.cpanm/build.log for details.


🙁

So I asked a friend. Who pointed me at his build script. And, at least for this project, that’s what I’m going to use.

Is perlbrew what most folks use for this type of thing? Is there some other virtualenv equivalent out there?