Recently I installed HTML::Template on my iBook (Mac OS X 10.3 Darwin). In my first attempt, I elected *not* to install the shared cache feature. The package installed and tested properly, with 2 tests which called the shared cache feature being properly skipped.
I then tried to reinstall *with* the shared cache feature by answering 'yes' at every prompt called by 'make'. Here I ran into considerable problems, as the shared cache feature has dependencies which are *not* listed in Makefile.PL. These dependencies are 'require'-ed rather than 'use'-d and the module puts these requires in 'eval' blocks. The modules required on the fly which gave me problems were:
Gtop: required for the memory_debug feature; documented at line 670; code begins at line 1038.
Gtop (http://search.cpan.org/~stas/GTop-0.14/) is described as Perl interface to libgtop. libgtop is a library not found on all OSes. I tried to understand its relationship to HTML::Template but noted these further problems: (1) The POD is all screwed up (e.g., http://search.cpan.org/~stas/GTop-0.14/Makefile.PL). The maintainer has responded and written a patch, but it will only get up to CPAN when the next version of the module is released. (2) The current version of GTop has not been extensively tested by testers.cpan -- only two testers have run it -- and it has failed all those tests. This suggests that the foundations of HTML::Template's memory_debug feature are shaky.
IPC::SharedCache: required for the shared_cache feature; documented at line 524, 665; code begins at line 1060, 1067.
IPC::SharedCache (http://search.cpan.org/~samtregar/IPC-SharedCache-1.3/) was also written by Sam Tregar, author of HTML::Template. IPC::SharedCache in turn has dependencies listed in its Makefile.PL. One is IPC::SysV, a module with which I was previously not acquainted, has been core since perl 5.005.
But the other is IPC::ShareLite (v0.06 or later) (http://search.cpan.org/~maurice/IPC-ShareLite-0.09/). This module has XS code (there be goblins). My attempt to install it on Darwin failed. I can't say why, but perhaps this quotation from the IPC::ShareLite README is relevant: "Your operating system must support SysV IPC (shared memory and semaphores) in order to use this module."
I tried to install the full-featured version of HTML::Template first via the CPAN.pm automated process, then by manually installing each dependency. I never succeeded in installing either Gtop or IPC::ShareLite. Consequently, I have only the non-shared cache version of HTML::Template to work with.
Has anyone else encountered these problems and developed a workaround?
Thanks for reading this far!
Jim Keenan
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