[Pdx-pm] Getting Started with CPAN

[Noj]

Ah, Developer Tools.  I'd heard of it re other things I wanted to try
on Mac, but couldn't find it on install DVD.  Did more googling and
found (on a non-apple site) that Developer Tools is spelled 'Xcode' on
the install DVD.  So Developer Tools are installed now...  As you
mentioned, I didn't have the 'make' command before installing DT
(whoops), but it is there now.

It's been a while since the last time I tried to get started on CPAN,
so I either forget or never saw the perlmodinstall manpage.  It seems
to have the trailhead for how to manually install modules and use the
cpan manager.  If I do something manually, and get into using the CPAN
package manager later, will it auto-detect the manually installed
stuff, or does it keep it's own running index of what it's been used
to install?

I don't want stuff to install to /usr/bin and possibly over-write OS X
stuff, how/when do I tell the CPAN app to put it somewhere else, and
get that new location in the execution path?  If that info is
somewhere on the path perlmodinstall manpage leads to, hopefully I'll
know it when I see it.  If anyone knows any big rocks in the path, or
a more concise 'here's how you do it on a mac', let me know.
Otherwise, I'll check in and post what I learned when I (hopefully)
figure it out.

For my immediate problem (almost solved without using modules): Anyone
know a perl one-liner to turn a plain UTF-8 file into a 'normal' ASCII
file that can be processed in perl without bringing a bunch of modules
into things?  Currently my workaround is to load the file (a Final Cut
Pro sequence, exported as XML) into the TextWrangler editor and then
'save as' 'Western (ISO latin 1)' encoding (with UNIX linebreaks).
This works fine for my purpose, but it seems like a silly manual step.
 At least Final Cut will re-import the modified XML, even though it's
not in UTF-8 anymore.

If nothing else, at least I have an awkward process working now, and
some breadcrumbs to follow for how to smooth things out in the future.
 Thanks!

-Noj

On 6/11/07, Tom Phoenix wrote:

> Say no more. Install the Developer Tools before you take another step.
> (Without those, do you even have make?) Although Mac OS X comes with
> perl, it's not ready for prime time without the Developer Tools.
>
> > just keep saying things like 'depends on [some other module],
> > prepend?', then lots of stuff scrolls by, and it asks to prepend
> > another module, sometimes a newer version of the same packages, and
> > finally wraps it up with a 'install failed' after 5+ minutes of this.
>
> Beyond that, is there anything in the perlmodinstall manpage that is
> giving you trouble?