On Tuesday, June 17, 2003, at 10:23 pm, Lorin Rivers wrote:
What will happen if I use the darwinports perl? Does it automagically replace the existing perl in terms of the command line and what not? Or would I have to use "/opt/bin/perl" for 5.8.0 (and just "perl" for 5.6)?
The thing you need to be careful of is installing into /System/Library/Perl - that would possibly break your system. I tend to champion CPAN because it was designed by perlers for perl, rather than a generic packaging system which has hundreds of distributions and their quirks to track, it's also part of the standard perl distribution, which means you have it there on your computer now. The whole install process is pretty straightforward as most of the kinks have been ironed out and there are documented problems and solutions for installing safely on OSX. The other reason I recommend this is you know what is on your system because you install it - in the past I used fink, which is actually a series of perl modules and started getting problems after I upgraded perl coming from the modules installed by fink unbeknowst to me.
I'm asking all these questions because I have hosed my perl more than once out of ignorance (most people find installing and configuring perl a trivial task,
Installing perl (to risk sounding like a troll from CLPM) is not for the casual user and as you have already found out it can impare your systems functionality if not done correctly. From your post I'm not too sure that you actually need to upgrade unless the scripts you want to use are trying to use modules which are only available for perl 5.8, or sytaxt which is special to perl 5.8. For the most part there is backwards compatibility between versions 5.x.
HTH
Robin
