local::lib, Red Hat, and Macs

As some of you may know, I comaintain local::lib with Matt S. Trout. We've had issues with local::lib on Red Hat / CentOS systems in the past. We thought that this was due to Red Hat breaking Perl, because they've had a history of doing so. As some of you may know, I now work at Pobox. They kindly provided me with a MacBook for work purposes. During the process of setting up this MacBook, I installed Perl from MacPorts, because of known issues with users modifying their system's Perl on a commercial Unix OS. In addition to this, I wanted to set up a local::lib environment to make working on Pobox code easier.

Everything was going well with this until I wanted to bootstrap local::lib:

    $ perl Makefile.PL --boostrap

    [churn]

    $ ls

    [lack of Makefile]

    # !

    $ perl Makefile.PL --bootstrap

    [churn]

    $ ls

    [presence of Makefile]

This behavior is exactly the same as what Red Hat and RH-derived systems exhibit when installing local::lib. Therefore, it seems safe to say that the problem is not Red Hat-specific and warrants an entirely new angle of investigation. I'm going to be pursuing this tonight, but I wanted to make note of my findings here. Like it or not, Red Hat is used a fair deal out in the wild, and getting local::lib to work on it would be a big win (not to mention the fact that I want it to work on the Mac that Pobox is graciously allowing me to use). I'll post here again with progress sometime very soon.