Perl-Critic fails to compile (perl 5.16.3 > 5.18.2) [Solved]

Fitzcarraldo · Last edited by Fitzcarraldo on Sun Apr 13, 2014 8:53 pm; edited 1 time in total

I have rerun perl-cleaner so many times over the last couple of days that I think my HDD is going to wear out. ;-)

The dev-lang/perl upgrade from 5.16.3 to 5.18.2 is causing me grief. I found the following threads that seem to cover the problem I'm having, but none of them solve my problem:

[SOLVED] XML::Parser perl module is required for intltool
[SOLVED] Perl-cleaner failing due to perl 5.16 / 5.18 conflict
having trouble with perl-5.18.2 and perl-cleaner [SOLVED]

I have tried:

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

Just how many (perl) things did you install outside portage (cpan included) ?

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 8:11 pm Post subject:

I have been using msgconvert.pl to convert Outlook .MSG files to .MIME files that KMail can read. To install it I followed the instructions on the author's Web site to install the Perl modules:

TomWij · Retired Dev Joined: 04 Jul 2012 Posts: 1553

You need to do a world upgrade (`emerge -auvDN @world`) before cleaning out Perl; if you done that and it still doesn't work, can you then file this as a bug at Gentoo Bugzilla?

Read here how to write a bug report, for more in-depth details and troubleshooting steps you can read our Bugzilla HOWTO.

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2014 12:24 pm Post subject:

I did do a world upgrade before running perl-cleaner but, as it did not run to completion (because of the aforementioned Perl problems), I then ran perl-cleaner, which also did not run to completion due to the aforementioned failure to re-merge Perl-Critic because Perl could not find List::MoreUtils (even though dev-perl/List-MoreUtils was already installed via Portage). As I mentioned in my earlier post, I tried re-installing List-MoreUtils via Portage and re-merging Perl-Critic but that made no difference. I also tried re-installing List::MoreUtils directly via cpan, and that also made no difference. Ditto for dev-perl/XML-Parser (XML::Parser). It's a vicious circle.

Could this problem have something to do with the fact that dev-perl/List-MoreUtils and dev-perl/XML-Parser are installed in different directories to the other Perl modules? Have a look carefully at the following output:

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2014 3:37 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your reply, VoidMage. You'll have to forgive my ignorance; I know nothing about Perl (apart from installing the two modules I mentioned earlier I never touch it). Are you saying that everything Perl-related under /usr/local/ should not be there and that I should delete everything Perl-related in /usr/local/ and sub-directories? Why is Portage installing it all there then? On a Gentoo ~amd64 multilib installation, where would you expect all the Perl modules be located? Which environment variables should I check?

Below is the output of the command perl -V I ran first as root user, then under my own user account. Are you saying those are completely wrong? I'd appreciate advice, bearing in mind I have no knowledge of Perl internals in Gentoo. Thanks in advance.

TomWij · Retired Dev Joined: 04 Jul 2012 Posts: 1553

Mixing Portage and non-Portage Perl might be a recipe for problems; so, trying to fix it without non-Portage Perl might be the way to go. You could manually rebuild the packages which are reported to be a problem; doing so, until that perl-cleaner by itself works again. This vicious circle might be a result of the introduction of subslots to the Perl packages; as in doing so, it changes the order in which things get rebuild a small bit. Enough to bring it to a confusing state. If needed and rebuilding the packages doesn't work, don't trust my further doubts; but consider to talk straight to the Gentoo maintainers, you can find their mail by looking for Perl on the list of Gentoo herds. Make sure to link them to this topic as it contains background information.

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

There's something pretty fishy about your perl installation.

Here (for perl 5.16) the paths look like this:

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2014 8:58 pm Post subject:

These are some of the contents under /usr/local/:

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

So, we've pretty much established that (at very least) your perl installation is shot to pieces.
Now, let's see if there are enough working pieces to recover smoothly.

Rule 0: nothing that's available in portage should be present in /usr/local; if portage ends up installing anything in /usr/local, that's nearly always caused by a misconfiguration on your side.

With so many perl binaries in /usr/local it's a bit surprising something didn't break earlier.
So, try to figure out if anything that in /usr/local got installed by portage and if not, remove it. If it did, try to reinstall and if it still ends up there read the build log till you figure out why it did. If that perl in /usr/local doesn't come from portage, that's the first thing you need to remove, as it will confuse many of the ebuilds to doing stuff wrong.

Just see which files did sys-lang/perl installed and remove the copies in /usr/local.

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2014 8:52 pm Post subject:

Many thanks for your advice. It's all good now. Here are the steps I followed:

1. Used "eix -I --only-names | grep perl" to find out which Perl-related packages were currently installed.

2. Unmerged all installed Perl-related packages:

mv · Watchman Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6747

The cleanest way is to create your own ebuild in your overlay. You can automate this task by using g-ctan.
However, in your case you will find the ebuild in the srcshelton overlay (you can use http://gpo.zugaina.org to check such things).

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2014 4:49 am Post subject:

Of course! I forgot to check 3rd-party overlays. :roll:

I downloaded the 0.912 ebuild from the srcshelton overlay, renamed it to Email-Outlook-Message-0.914.ebuild, as 0.914 is the latest version of Email::Outlook::Message in GitHub, and it merges perfectly. msgconvert.pl is now working again on my main laptop. Thanks.
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