Today I discovered perlbrew, a utility for managing multiple versions of Perl under a non-root account, in the same spirit as rvm or virtualenv. I was forced into discovering perlbrew, because installing XCode 4 onto a Mac breaks the ability to compile many CPAN modules if you stick with the computer's default Perl.
Even with perlbrew, you might still have trouble compiling CPAN modules on a Mac, if those modules need older 32-bit code. This is because perlbrew doesn't build its perls as fat binaries, it builds them as 64-bit only.
I used perlbrew to install Perl 5.14.1, and then I was trying to install Test::Continuous, which has a long chain of dependencies including Mac::Growl, Mac::Growl itself depending on Mac::Carbon. Mac::Carbon is 32-bit. I was able to work around this, but I had to (temporarily) leave the CPAN shell to do it. The steps are:
- Install Cocoa::Growl as a 64-bit alternative to Mac::Growl. You can use the CPAN shell for this.
- Install Log::Dispatch::MacGrowl. This module will recognize that you
have Cocoa::Growl installed, but for some reason it still won't install
via CPAN shell. But it will install if you download the tarball and build manually.
- Now via CPAN install Log::Dispatch::DesktopNotification.
- Now via CPAN install Test::Continuous.
