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.)


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5 responses to “Fedora Core / RHEL don’t seem to come with up-to-date versions of Scalar::Util”

  1. Josh Avatar
    Josh

    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 🙂

  2. Fugu Avatar

    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.

  3. Pierre Jochem Avatar
    Pierre Jochem

    You are my hero 😉 Got this error after a perl update from SuSE Linux 10

  4. Ian Avatar

    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!

  5. Anonymous Avatar

    Thank you! It really work!
    But

    force install Bundle::CPAN

    and

    upgrade

    immediatelly after this was also useful for me.

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