Mac OS X comes with Perl installed — that’s good. But it doesn’t come with all the modules you may want. On Ubuntu this is no problem: most modules can be found with aptitude as packaged by Ubuntu and their friends. I was trying to think how to manage Perl modules on my Mac in a similar way, so I could track what is installed. What I didn’t think of was the fact that no software is tracked on the Mac anyway, so why should I care.
Thus I should happily use CPAN to add any modules I might need. Maybe not the most secure thing in the world to run as root, but that’s the expected way to do it…
Turns out there is still a hiccup, but apparently just with Xcode 4: there is no ppc assembler on the system, but Perl is configured to expect one. Fortunately others have already figured this out — the full problem and a fix are presented in Perl and Xcode 4.
I guess I should be backing up the list of installed Perl modules somehow.