Stumped with a CPAN/CPANPLUS failure

[Ville Walveranta]

I'm trying to get CPAN or, preferably CPANPLUS working on a dual-CPU
FreeBSD 4.8 server (with plenty of free memory), and have ran into a
problem that I don't appear to resolve. Either of the utilities
experiences a core dump during it's operation:

Output from CPAN:
---
cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.61)
ReadLine support enabled

cpan> get Net:NS
CPAN: Storable loaded ok
CPAN: LWP::UserAgent loaded ok
Fetching with LWP:
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
Going to read /root/.cpan/sources/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
CPAN: Compress::Zlib loaded ok
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
---


and CPANPLUS (both 0.043 and 0.045 behave the same way):
---
CPANPLUS::Shell:efault -- CPAN exploration and modules installation
(v0.03)
*** Please report bugs to <[email protected]>.
*** Using CPANPLUS::Backend v0.045. ReadLine support enabled.

CPAN Terminal> m Net:NS
Checking if source files are up to date
Gunzipping /root/.cpanplus/01mailrc.txt.gz
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
---

Since the problem often appears to occur when CPAN/CPANPLUS is
gunzipping files, I upgraded gzip to the latest version in ports,
`gzip --version' produces...

---
gzip 1.3.5
(2002-09-30)
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation
Copyright 1992-1993 Jean-loup Gailly
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You may redistribute copies of this program
under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING.
Compilation options:
DIRENT UTIME STDC_HEADERS HAVE_UNISTD_H HAVE_MEMORY_H HAVE_STRING_H
HAVE_LSTAT ASMV
Written by Jean-loup Gailly.
---

The system has Perl 5.8 (installed from the ports collection) that
appears to be working otherwise. I've tried with numerous combinations
of configuration options including "-j3" for CPANPLUS for dual CPUs,
internal MALLOC for Perl, etc.

On the parallel server with largely the same configuration (though
FreeBSD 4.6.3) both CPAN and CPANPLUS work ok. The system that is
experiencing problems with the utilities was recently upgraded from
4.7 to 4.8 as one of the attempts to resolve this problem, but it had
no effect (Perl was recompiled afterwards; `make test' produced no
errors).

After CPANPLUS has been configured, `make test' yields the following
result, ending in an error while probing dependencies:

---
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Backend/RV.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Shell/Default.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Tools/Module.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Internals.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Tools/Load.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Backend.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Styleguide.pod (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Internals/Report.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/I18N/CPANPLUS.pot (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/FAQ.pod (unchanged)
cp lib/CPANPLUS/Config.pm blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Config.pm
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Tools/Cmd.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Tools/Term.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Internals/Utils.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Shell.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Internals/Module.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Internals/Install.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Internals/Source.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Configure/Setup.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Internals/Fetch.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Internals/Module/Status.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Shell/Classic.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Tools/Check.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Configure.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Config.pm-orig (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/I18N.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Internals/Make.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Internals/Search.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Internals/Extract.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Internals/Author.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Internals/System.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/Error.pm (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/TesterGuide.pod (unchanged)
Skip blib/lib/CPANPLUS/I18N/fr.po (unchanged)
/usr/local/bin/perl Makefile.PL
--config=-skiptest,1,-prereqs,1,-do_once,1
--installdeps=File::RsyncP,0,CPANPLUS::Shell::Curses,0.02,CPANPLUS::Shell::Tk,0.02
*** Installing dependencies...
Checking if source files are up to date
Gunzipping /root/.cpanplus/01mailrc.txt.gz
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
*** Error code 139

Stop in /usr/local/src/CPANPLUS-0.045.
---

Installing any of the modules from the ports seems to work without any
problems, only CPAN/CPANPLUS shell interfaces fail.

Any ideas as to what I could try next? Also, if this is not the right
place to ask this question, please point me to the right direction.

Thanks for any advice!

Ville Walveranta

 

[Ville Walveranta]

I'm trying to get CPAN or, preferably CPANPLUS working on a dual-CPU
FreeBSD 4.8 server (with plenty of free memory), and have ran into a
problem that I don't appear to resolve. Either of the utilities
experiences a core dump during it's operation: ....
CPAN Terminal> m Net:NS
Checking if source files are up to date
Gunzipping /root/.cpanplus/01mailrc.txt.gz
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
---

I'm answering to my own question since this problem was solved...
maybe the answer will help someone. As the port for the new version of
Perl (5.8.1) appeared in FreeBSD ports collection update, I installed
it and... CPAN and CPAN++ shells started working, too! I'm not sure
whether there was an actual bug with 5.8.0 since I had the shells
working ok on a parallel system running 5.8.0. Maybe the fact that I
reinstalled Perl helped (though I had done so few times using 5.8.0 on
the system that was having problems).

// Ville