Bug #75262 for App-perlbrew: Better error checking when installing or switching perls

Hi, I have just discovered perlbrew. Thanks for this nifty tool. During my experimentations, I have discovered that a few areas that could need improvement. # Perlbrew is installed and working $ perlbrew list perl-5.8.9 # Trying to install perl-5.6.1 $ perlbrew -v install perl-5.6.1 [...] Failed 6 test scripts out of 251, 97.61% okay. [...] u=0.11 s=0.09 cu=3.69 cs=1.34 scripts=251 tests=11152 make: *** [test] Error 1 Installed /home/floflooo/perl5/perlbrew/build/perl-5.6.1 as perl-5.6.1 successfully. Run the following command to switch to it. perlbrew switch perl-5.6.1 # Despite the success message, it is clear that perl-5.6.1 was not installed successfully. Without the verbose mode, one would think everything went according to plan. $ perlbrew list perl-5.8.9 # But let's try to use perl-5.6.1 anyway... $ perlbrew switch perl-5.6.1 Use of uninitialized value $perl_name in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/share/perl5/App/perlbrew.pm line 1161. Use of uninitialized value $perl_name in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/share/perl5/App/perlbrew.pm line 1161. # Outside a couple of warnings, there are no error messages, even though perl 5.6.1 was not used $ perl -v This is perl 5, version 14, subversion 2 [...] # Maybe my issues are simply because perl-5.6.1 is not in the available perl. Let's try an available perl $ perlbrew available perl-5.15.8 perl-5.14.2 perl-5.12.4 perl-5.10.1 i perl-5.8.9 perl-5.6.2 perl5.005_04 perl5.004_05 perl5.003_07 $ perlbrew -v install perl-5.6.2 [...] Failed 6 test scripts out of 353, 98.30% okay. [...] u=0.22 s=0.17 cu=8.02 cs=2.68 scripts=353 tests=13096 make: *** [test] Error 1 Installed /home/floflooo/perl5/perlbrew/build/perl-5.6.2 as perl-5.6.2 successfully. Run the following command to switch to it. perlbrew switch perl-5.6.2 # Still no luck with an available version of perl. Note that without verbose mode, perlbrew detects that something went wrong $ perlbrew install perl-5.6.2 Installing /home/floflooo/perl5/perlbrew/build/perl-5.6.2 into ~/perl5/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.6.2 This could take a while. You can run the following command on another shell to track the status: tail -f ~/perl5/perlbrew/build.log Installing /home/floflooo/perl5/perlbrew/build/perl-5.6.2 failed. See /home/floflooo/perl5/perlbrew/build.log to see why. If you want to force install the distribution, try: perlbrew --force install perl-5.6.2 So, here are a few things that could be improved: 1/ 'perlbrew available' is a bit confusing. From the documentation, it is the list of perl available on CPAN, but not all perls ever released. Where are the perls not listed that seem to be installable coming from? If other perls are available, it would be worth it to list them here. 2/ Better detection of cases when the desired perl was not installed properly when installing with the verbose option. 3/ Have an error message when trying to switch to a perl version that is not installed (or failed to install succesfully). Thanks for the hard work and looking forward to seeing how newer releases of perlbrew evolve. Florent