I'm helping test/port the Bioperl package to MacPerl and I've run into a few
problems that have prompted some questions.
Is there an equivalent to "make test" under MacPerl? I've used Chris
Nandor's excellent "untarzipme.plx" and "installme.plx", but there doesn't
seem to be a "testme.plx". I've been forced to run the tests manually
one-by-one, which is a bit tedious since there are 60 of them.
Along those lines, is there a command-line gzip/ungzip available for Macs?
One of the bioperl modules will gzip/ungzip reports on the fly using the
standard Unix tools and it would be nice to get this to work automatically
like it does on the Unix side. I'm guessing not, otherwise this would
probably be included in the standard Mac kit.
Is cluck supported in Carp? I've done a bit of searching and it appears that
cluck was added to Carp between 5.00307 and 5.00405. Since MacPerl is at
patchlevel 5.004, I assumed it would be there, but only confess, croak, and
carp are there. Is it because cluck handles stack traces?
What's the best way to do temporary file creation? BioPerl seems to have
chosen File::Temp, which requires File::Spec, which requires Errno.pm. The
process fails at the end because 'archname' is not defined for MacOS.
Does TIE work completely under MacPerl? One of the modules depends on
IO::String - which doesn't work. It fails on the constructor:
sub new
{
my $class = shift;
my $self = bless Symbol::gensym(), ref($class) || $class;
tie *$self, $self; # <- this line fails
$self->open(@_);
$self;
}
The error message is: Can't locate object method "TIEHANDLE" via package
"IO::String=GLOB(0xbab5a4c)". I naively assumed that Tie::Handle was missing
(which it was), so I installed Tie::Handle 3.0. No difference. IO::String
requires 5.005 - is TIEHANDLE one of the reasons?
That's about it for now, though I'm sure there will be more...
Thanks, Todd
--
Dr Todd Richmond http://cellwall.stanford.edu/todd
Carnegie Institution email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Department of Plant Biology fax: 1-650-325-6857
260 Panama Street phone: 1-650-325-1521 x431
Stanford, CA 94305
