Testing Perl 5.12.0 RC 1 with App::perlbrew

Mar 30, 2010 by chromatic

I’m working on a project with Curtis “Ovid” Poe and Adrian Howard. We use Perl 5.10.1, but because we control which version of Perl 5 we use, there’s no reason not to test with Perl 5.12.0 – and if we find bugs, we can report them and get them fixed in the proper place.

This application has its own quirks for setup and installation. I managed to clean up some of the worst offenses as my first work on the project; it installs and passes tests on my server with Perl 5.10.1, so it should install cleanly if all of its dependencies work with Perl 5.12.

My first approach was to manage my own parallel installation of Perl 5 with local::lib and a custom installation of Perl 5.12, but the manual intervention required to make all of that work was enough of a hassle that I took a tip from Chris Prather and installed App::perlbrew to manage my various installations (system Perl 5.10.0 built with threading, custom Perl 5.10.1 without threads, and now Perl 5.12.0 RC1).

    $ cpan App::perlbrew
    $ perlbrew init
    $ echo 'source /home/chromatic/perl5/perlbrew/etc/bashrc' >> ~/.bashrc
    $ source /home/chromatic/perl5/perlbrew/etc/bashrc
    $ perlbrew install perl-5.12.0-RC1 -as p512

The -as p512 option was optional; it lets me use p512 as a short name to refer to that particular installation when switching between versions.

After a while with no obvious output (which is fine), the end result is the ability to switch between parallel Perl 5 installations without them stomping on each other. They’re all installed locally in my own home directory, so I can use CPAN or cpanminus to install modules without worrying about root access or messing up the system for anyone else.

I had already installed local::lib, but I’m not sure it’s necessary in this case.

With the changes to my .bashrc, now perl is a symlink. Switching my version with perlbrew swaps a symlink, so every time I invoke perl directly, it uses the intended version. Shebang lines remain unaffected, so anything which invokes a program directly will use a hard-coded version of Perl. Unfortunately, this includes cpanm, so I took to using an alias which does perl `which cpanm` as a temporary workaround. Miyagawa suggested not using CPAN to install cpanminus. Instead, he recommends:

$ curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - App::cpanminus

Note that you’ll have to do this for every new version of Perl you install with perlbrew.

Here’s the nice part of perlbrew. I can also install Perl 5.10.1 through it (replacing my custom installation) and switch between the two with a simple command:

    $ perlbrew switch p5101
    $ perlbrew switch perl-5.10.1

You can see what you have installed with:

    $ perlbrew installed

For those of you curious as to the results of my experiments with 5.12.0, Devel::Cover doesn’t work correctly yet, but that’s not a requirement for this project. Devel::BeginLift needs a patch to build. Fortunately, that’s available in the RT queue. A manual build and test worked just fine. Other than that, a little bit of babysitting on the installation satisfied all of the dependencies.

If I’d had to manage the installation (and module paths and…) of all of this software, I’d have spent a lot more time on the fiddly details of installing dependencies and not the interesting part. App::perlbrew allowed me to concentrate on what really matters: does my software work?

Perl 5.12.0 will come out soon. Use App::perlbrew to test code you care about with it.