| Subject: | Tarball Paths & FreeBSD Build Failure |
Hello there. Thank you for File::Rsync. Unfortunately it doesn't install neatly on FreeBSD.
FreeBSD comes with perl 5.005_03, and for some reason its @INC has . before some of the system library directories. In particular, . comes before the directory containing Config.pm, which is used as part of the installation process to determine the config of the current perl installation.
This of course means that installation fails if the current directory happens to contain a file called Config.pm which isn't the system Config.pm. The distribution for File::Rsync happens to contain Config.pm, providing the File::Rsync::Config module, so building it fails.
I don't really think this is your fault; it seems very strange for FreeBSD to have set the paths up like this, and they're not doing it with the perl 5.8 releases in the ports system, but unfortunately any stable FreeBSD servers out there are configured in this way. However, if you switched to using a different tarball layout (for example, current practice seems to be to have File/Rsync/Config.pm in the tarball, in subdirectories) it would avoid the problem.
In the meantime persuaded the module to install by setting PERL5LIB:
$ PERL5LIB=/usr/libdata/perl/5.00503/mach sudo perl5.00503 -MCPAN -e 'install File::Rsync'
As an alternative, perhaps you could put this in the README or somewhere, in the hope that it's of use to others -- it took me far too long to track down the cause of the problem!
Cheers.
Smylers