November 30, 2007

Fedora Core / RHEL don't seem to come with up-to-date versions of Scalar::Util

I ran into this problem once before on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine, and now I am having the same problem on my Fedora Core (7 I think) machine. The problem is that CPAN is unable to install various things, in particular Bundle::CPAN, because:
You don't have the XS version of Scalar::Util
I have also run into problems where I get an error message like:
Weak references are not implemented in the version of perl
Both of these can be fixed by using CPAN to install an up-to-date version of Scalar::Util:
perl -MCPAN -e shell
force install Scalar::Util
You might have to force the install if you have an up-to-date version of Scalar::Util (which I did) but it had been compiled without the proper options to support XS.

If you are interested in finding out more a simple search should turn up lots more information. I find it shocking that modern Perl distributions can be around that leave out such a commonly-used feature. Hopefully Redhat / Fedora will get around to fixing it in their next release (and if not, at least I've left myself a note here.)

Comments

Provide your email address when commenting and Gravatar will provide general portable avatars, and if you haven't signed up with them, a cute procedural avatar with their implementation of Shamus Young's Wavatars.

Re: Fedora Core / RHEL don't seem to come with up-to-date versions of Scalar::Util
I just ran into this same problem with a fresh install of CentOS 5.1. I, too, find it shocking that a modern distro is so horribly broken. It's mind boggling. Thanks for putting up your experience, it helped me through mine :)

Posted 13 years, 10 months ago by Josh • • • Reply
Re: Fedora Core / RHEL don't seem to come with up-to-date versions of Scalar::Util
Hi Josh, I'm glad you found it useful. I like writing up solutions to random problems I run into because I have benefited a lot from reading other people's problems/solutions posts on blogs, so I might as well leave around a few of my own.
Posted 13 years, 9 months ago by Fugu • • www • Reply
Re: Fedora Core / RHEL don't seem to come with up-to-date versions of Scalar::Util
You are my hero ;-) Got this error after a perl update from SuSE Linux 10
Posted 13 years, 8 months ago by Pierre Jochem • @ • • Reply
Re: Fedora Core / RHEL don't seem to come with up-to-date versions of Scalar::Util
Add me to the list of folks who had the good fortune to stumble on this one -- first google hit for "You don't have the XS version of Scalar::Util", and it had a nice easy solution. Thanks!
Posted 13 years, 7 months ago by Ian • • • Reply
Re: Fedora Core / RHEL don't seem to come with up-to-date versions of Scalar::Util
Thank you! It really work!
But

force install Bundle::CPAN

and

upgrade

immediatelly after this was also useful for me.
Posted 13 years, 1 month ago by Anonymous • • www • Reply

Comments have now been turned off for this post