Hi Nick. Thanks for the reply.
I already knew of the FreeBSD stock perl issues and was aware that under no circumstances should I try to upgrade the stock Perl, but I appreciate the reminded nontheless!! I gave up on trying to install the SpamAssassin I obtained manually from spamassassin.org after it bitched that my Bundle::Net (or similar, sorry, forget the exact package) was out of date. Trying to install it via CPAM crapped out bigtime and seems to have left my stock FreeBSD perl setup in a goofy state. Perl would spit out nasty method tracebacks. Can someone tell me if it is possible to redo just the perl portion of a "make installworld" so I can reset my stock module config ? Giving up on this approach, with the help of Jan Grant's earlier reply I got the ports tree to work. [I needed to unpack the whole ports.tgz, not just the spamassassin subdir] First problem was that the MD5 on the downloaded distfile (that the ports Makefile downloaded from spamassassin.org) didn't match: < MD5 (Mail-SpamAssassin-2.60.tar.gz) = 65ece9dec35cc4701d98680d0651afd3 --- > MD5 (Mail-SpamAssassin-2.60.tar.gz) = 46d1db67ed1d860ddb136e0beb5f6ac3 I temporarily updated the MD5 so I could get past this, e-mailed the maintainer. I wasn't planning on installing until I heard back, but since the stock make did a bunch of perl module updating foo, if the tar.gz is trojaned I could already be screwed :-( Next the make groks when it tries to configure spamd, claims gcc isn't in the PATH, though it's in roots path once make drops back to the shell. This is probably easily fixable, but at this point I gave up and started working on what I get paid to do :-) All of this is on FreeBSD 4.9. I'm reminded of Greg Lemis's chastisement of me for previously not using the FreeBSD Ports system. It isn't making my life much easier here :-))) Tony > Hm, well, if you hate perl perhaps you should consider using a spam > filtering package written in some other language! > > The problem with FreeBSD and perl is well documented . . . basically the > FreebSD system has perl 5.005_03 which is a very old version nowadays, and > many modules require 5.6.1 at least if not 5.8+. > > The simplest and easiest way to clear up these problems is to install a > new perl from source, in a non-standard location, so it creates its own > libraries from scratch. I recommend creating a user perl and installing > everything under /home/perl. Then at the end just change the symlinks to > /usr/bin/perl etc. > > Do _not_ try to install a new perl over the 5.005 version that FreeBSD has > installed by default. FreeBSD creates non-standard library locations and > you will have lots of problems. > > If you follow this advice you won't have any problem using CPAN to install > libwww, Mail::SpamAssassin and all the other modules you need or currently > use.perl and CPAN are _very_ reliable. > > If you upgrade your FreeBSD to 5.1 you will find that the stock perl is > 5.6.1 and most stuff Just Works with it. The perl has also been separated > from the base distribution and is now installed as a package (or port) so > it doesn't break when you update it. > > On FreeBSD prior to 5.x I always built a new perl from source as I > described, and then built all my applications from source too (including > apache, mod_perl, mysql and a bunch of perl applications like > SpanAssassin). I too have encountered the 'ports or bust' mentality and > while it is good in theory it just doesn't work in practise where perl is > concerned. And there's way too much stuff depends on perl (for me at > least) for it to be flaky. > > Hope this helps, _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
