Mac OS X-Installing Perl 5.8 on Jaguar
OS X users that have installed Fink may experience various symbol errors when executing certain Perl operations. More on this can be found in the macosx@perl.org archives.
What this means is that perl 5.8 breaks fink. Plain and simple. This claims to be the solution, but right now I would just as soon get 5.6 back. It isn’t, but read on for a solution.
How annoying. There’s nothing in the excerpt above that I parse as “fink and perl 5.8 are incompatible: choose one or the other.”
Update:
The two versions of perl — the 5.6 release that ships with OS X 10.x and the 5.8 release that’s supposed to be better — put their libperl files in different places.So I simply copied the perl executable from another machine I hadn’t “upgraded.” I’d feel better if I had the original distribution or was building from source: that’s next, I guess.
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 862676 Jul 27 20:02 /System/Library/Perl/darwin/CORE/libperl.dylib
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root admin 1118836 Sep 10 12:25 /Library/Perl/darwin/CORE/libperl.dylib
/Library is for user-installed stuff and /System/Library is for, well, system stuff, what ships with the OS. Version numbers would be useful, but this filing convention saved me this time.