Because I recently had the opportunity to do a fresh re-install of my world1, I’ve spent the last few days playing with App::perlbrew. App::perlbrew is the invention of Kang-min Liu aka gugod, and the basic idea is that it’s a perl manager. It will install and track several different installations of Perl for you, allowing you to switch between them at will.
$perlbrew installed
perl-5.10.1
perl-5.8.9
perl-5.6.2
$perlbrew switch perl-5.10.1
$perl -v
This is perl, v5.10.1 (*) built for darwin-2level
I’d like to state now that what gugod had was very nice. It was very simple, very straight forward and did exactly what it said on the package. I have not spoke with him about this application, and anything I say here is my opinion and has no reflection upon him or anybody else that might have been involved.
Having seen what power some simple scripting can do in the form of Miyagawa’s App::cpanminus, I started tinkering with perlbrew. It started with perl 5.10.1 not installing properly on Snow Leopard2, so the first thing I added was a way to force install.
perlbrew install -f perl-5.10.1
Then I decided it and local::lib both sharing $HOME/perl5 wasn’t going to be pretty. So I taught it to use an environment variable PERLBREW_ROOT to relocate the default install. In my setup I have it set to $HOME/.perlbrew.
$export PERLBREW_ROOT=$HOME/.perlbrew
$perlbrew init
Attempting to create directory /Users/perigrin/.perlbrew/perls/current
Perlbrew environmet Initiated.
Required directories are created under /Users/perigrin/.perlbrew.
Please add this to the end of your ~/.bashrc:
source /Users/perigrin/.perlbrew/etc/bashrc
Then I got annoyed with the pages of verbose output, so I stole a page from cpanminus and implemented a quiet switch that is enabled by default. Output now goes to $PERLBREW_ROOT/build.log.
Today I integrated it with local::lib so that if you have local::lib installed it will drop the proper configuration in the perlbrew configuration scripts so that when you install new modules they get installed into your perlbrew managed directories3.
Finally just now I finished getting --as= working. This means that if you build a custom perl you can have it installed under a special name and then easily switch to and from it. I’m planning on using this to build a --as-workperl that contains all the modules I need for work.
$perlbrew install perl-5.10.1 --as=debugging-perl -D=debugging
I would like to integrate a plugin system4, but all in all I’m very happy with it. Much thanks to gugod for making it to start with, and to Miyagawa for getting me itching for small lightweight tools in my toolchain. If you’re interested in my changes, you can check them out on my github
Last week I upgraded my trusty Macbook Pro from OSX 10.5 (Leopard) to OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard), using a “complete wipe”. The old system had been around for ~3 years and was showing the cruft so it was time. ↩
Apparently there is an issue with Snow Leopard’s locales, and a single test fails. ↩
Full disclosure, I got this to the proof of concept stage but not really much further. It currently expects local::lib to be installed to $HOME/perl5 (which is the default). If you have it installed somewhere else, you’ll need to manually set up the environment. ↩
Having recently played with plugins in cpanminus I have to say they’re incredibly nifty. The github plugin is especially nice. I especially would like a plugin to allow swapping Git in for several parts of the system. ↩