Third party libraries are troublesome at the best of times, but I don't usually have so much trouble as I did yesterday.
As the Google Calendar thing seems to be growing in popularity, I firstly wanted to create a Birmingham.pm version of our own ICS feed. My ultimate aim is to be able to automatically update Google Calendars that I have access to, when I add, amend or delete calendar entries for Birmingham Perl Mongers events.
So I set about installing muttley's Net::Google::Calendar. As I write most my development code on Windows, I started out trying to install it on my XP laptop. It became traumatic simply because of the libxml2 and ssleay libraries. I did manage to get both install evenutally, only to find the ssleay DLL doesn't work on XP.
Next up I tried on a remote Debian server. This time the xmllib2 library caused problems. Even though it was installed and was the latest version from the debian stable repository, XML-LibXML and XML-Atom couldn't find it!
Finally I tried my home Debian box. It seems running apt-get and cpan from the command line just got themselves in knots. I finally used synaptic this morning and installed the dependencies cleanly. Then ran cpan to install Net::Google::Calendar. Finally it worked!
Installation shouldn't be this troublesome. As far as I was aware synaptic is mostly a pretty wrapper around apt-get, so why the command line version kept failing to find libraries I have no idea. Hopefully I can get this installed on the new server we're planning for Birmingham.pm, so I can implement the Google Calendar automatic update features.
Re:your problem is trusting debian perl packages
barbie on 2007-04-12T06:45:23
Except cpan was having just as many problems! On the one box, after installing libxml2 and rerunning cpan, it failed to locate the library
:( I don't think this a Perl issue though, it's more the way 3rd party libraries are installed and seem to be a lot more fragile these days.
