Hello,

I have been installing packages to local directories using “./configure –prefix=” or “perl ./Makefile PREFIX=”. Also, I have been setting the environment variable PERL5LIB. I noticed some messages that made me think that I was setting the “prefix” and PERL5LIB directories wrong.

An example of one those messages involving the “PERL5LIB”:
could not find ParserDetails.ini in /home/nmsutton/Local_Installations/lib/perl5/site_perl//5.8.8/XML/SAX

Example of one of those messages involving the “prefix”:
Appending installation info to /home/nmsutton/Local_Installations//lib/perl5/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/perllocal.pod

Notice the double forward (//) slashes above. Those slashes looked like they were the problem. I specified directory paths for “PERL5LIB” and “prefix” without a forward slash (/) at the end of the directory paths. That seems to cause the unusual/error messages including double forward slashes to go away.

Also, I had a similar situation with specifying directories for a package named expat for a package named XML-Parser.

What I did was I installed packages using the PERL5LIB and PREFIX directory settings that appeared to be wrong. Then, without uninstalling those packages I corrected the PERL5LIB and PREFIX directory settings and installed the packages again. The question I have is have I created a problem by installing then not uninstalling those packages but instead installing again the packages with the settings changes described above? Should I have uninstalled the packages before reinstalling them? Would not uninstalling them have created a problem? This work is for genetics research I am involved in so I am really trying to make sure that things are working.

Thanks,

Nate

P. S.
The packages that the above situation occurred to are:
ExtUtils-MakeMaker-6.56, Compress-Raw-Zlib-2.030, Compress-Raw-Bzip2-2.031, IO::Compress (A Perl module), Html::Tagset (Perl module), libwww-perl-5.837, expat-2.0.1, XML-Parser-2.36, XML-Grove-0.46alpha, XML-NamespaceSupport-1.11, XML-SAX

Don't know the answer. But the number of slashes does not normally make any difference. Try any command with vast numbers of slashes in the path, it should work perfectly as normal.

Thank you for looking into the scenario I described lugoteehalt. Possibly it does not make a difference in the packages I installed. On the other hand I don’t know what the unusual messages I described seeing implicate. I think I will rm –rf (remove) the directories with the packages I installed. Since I installed the packages locally I should be able to wipe the packages off the computer and reinstall them in a way that does not produce the unusual messages. I’d still be interested in knowing if anyone has more information about my original question. Also, if I rm -rf the directories I locally installed the packages in won't that uninstall them by deleting them? Will that rm -rf then allow me to do a clean install of the packages without there being any left over parts of old installations being present on the computer?

Thank you,

Nate

On the surface of it, i.e. prima faci, you have installed things into your sort of home directory - or called it 'local' or something.

With me I get things like /home/lugo/bin in my home directory when using --prefix=/home/lugo .

So it is simple to 'uninstall' this sort of thing. As you say you can just delete it. It is all under the 'prefix'. None of it is in the rest of the computer.

Thank you for the further information. I am going to try the deleting all files and doing a clean installation strategy later.

I performed a clean install and the double forward slashes (//) in messages went away when I used different setting the prefix= option and other options described in my earlier post.

However, the “could not find ParserDetails.ini in /home/nmsutton/Local_Installations/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/XML/SAX” message still appeared when I installed the Perl module XML::SAX. I think another version of XML::SAX is installed on the computer I am installing XML::SAX into my home directory on. The XML::SAX package maintainer from CPAN told me that “The XML::SAX installer can get confused if a previous version is installed or partially installed. If that message does not recur after installation then don't worry about it.”

From what the maintainer wrote to me it seems to me that if the message does not recur after testing than XML::SAX is safe to use. My question is: how can I test the recurrence of that ParserDetails.ini error message?