Month: June 2008

Installing DBI on Leopard’s perl 5.8.8

I needed to get my perl installation updated to do some development locally. As usual, perl was a pain in the ass. Long story short: Install Xcode 3.0, copy the “reentr.inc” file from the 5.8.8 source distribution, and DBI should install.

Below is the long-winded log of my woes, offered in the hopes it might help someone.

First, DBI 1.604 wouldn’t install via cpan, so I tried installing it by hand. But I just got the same error when running “make”:

No rule to make target `/System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/config.h', needed by `Makefile'.

I found this blog post, “Leopard Perl 5.8.8 installation throws errors when compiling (makefile)” mentioning the exact message, which recommended copying the CORE directory from 5.8.6 instead the above location. I tried that, but then I got this error instead:

DBI.xs: In function ‘dbi_profile’:
DBI.xs:2398: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘GvSVn’
DBI.xs:2398: error: invalid lvalue in assignment
DBI.xs: In function ‘dbi_profile’:
DBI.xs:2398: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘GvSVn’
DBI.xs:2398: error: invalid lvalue in assignment
DBI.xs: In function ‘XS_DBI_dispatch’:
DBI.xs:2970: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast
DBI.xs:2972: error: invalid lvalue in assignment
DBI.xs:2985: error: invalid type argument of ‘->’
DBI.xs:2989: error: invalid lvalue in assignment
DBI.xs:3293: warning: unused variable ‘Perl___notused’
DBI.xs: In function ‘XS_DBI_dispatch’:
DBI.xs:2970: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast
DBI.xs:2972: error: invalid lvalue in assignment
DBI.xs:2985: error: invalid type argument of ‘->’
DBI.xs:2989: error: invalid lvalue in assignment

Googling these error messages turned up surprisingly little. On another blog with a post titled, “Mac OS 10.5: Leopard” that mentioned difficulties with DBI, commenters suggested various solutions, but none of them worked for me. The blog author got an older version of DBI to install but I couldn’t get that to work either.

I discovered that Xcode 3.0 (developer tools for Leopard) contains the 5.8.8 files that belong in that CORE directory. This seemed like a better option than copying the probably outdated 5.8.6 files. You can get the gigantic Xcode disk image, a whopping 1.1 gigabytes, from the Apple Developer Connection site. Registration is required through the “Member” link, and once you’re in, go to Downloads and search for Xcode.

Before installing Xcode, I cleared out the hosed CORE directory I’d been mucking with. “DeveloperTools.pkg” is what contains the perl headers, so you can probably get away with just installing that (double-click it), instead of the entire XcodeTools.pkg. It did the trick: the compiler was now finding the “GvSVn” symbol it couldn’t before. But now I got this message during make:

In file included from DBIXS.h:19,
from Perl.xs:6:
/System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/perl.h:3993:22: error: reentr.inc: No such file or directory
In file included from DBIXS.h:19,
from Perl.xs:6:
/System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/perl.h:3993:22: error: reentr.inc: No such file or directory
lipo: can't open input file: /var/tmp//ccQ8vbDU.out (No such file or directory)
make: *** [Perl.o] Error 1

In desperation, I downloaded the perl 5.8.8 source distribution tarball, and simply copied reentr.inc into the CORE directory. Voila! Make went to completion and I could install the module. From there, I went back into cpan to install DBD::mysql without any problems (you need mysql installed in the default location, /usr/local/mysql, of course).

On Programmer Insecurity: Is it Personality or the Market?

Here’s a wonderful blog post by Ben Sussman-Collins, “Programmer Insecurity”, to which Jesse Noller has responded with “Programmer Insecurity and Mea Culpa”. (I don’t know either of these folks, I just follow their blogs in my RSS reader.) Ben talks about the need for more transparency, communication, and iterative growth in a programmer’s development:

Be transparent. Share your work constantly. Solicit feedback. Appreciate critiques. Let other people point out your mistakes. You are not your code. Do not be afraid of day-to-day failures — learn from them. (As they say at Google, “don’t run from failure — fail often, fail quickly, and learn.”) Cherish your history, both the successes and mistakes. All of these behaviors are the way to get better at programming. If you don’t follow them, you’re cheating your own personal development.

At the moment, I’m lucky to have fairly down-to-earth colleagues who generally foster these principles, but overall, this sort of perspective is sadly all too rare.

I don’t think it’s purely a matter of personality peculiar to programmers, or as Ben suggests, just “human nature” to fear embarrassment. I mean, sure, to an extent… but the fear is also fostered by a competitive labor market that values personal marketing over personal growth.

That’s why there are so many “best practices” blogs, vanity websites boasting of track records, and heated religious arguments about almost anything pertaining to code. The market has created a culture of showing off. And if you can demonstrate you are more “perfect” than the next guy or gal, you’ll impress the interviewer and land the job or the gig. One might argue, rightfully, that these are not great places to work. But places like Google where there is a generous philosophy of employee growth are probably the exception rather than the rule.

I can remember a time when things were different.

Making It Happen

A while ago, I had an idea for a cool website. It involved grouping blog posts under “debate” questions. There was a simple mechanism for auto-detection if you linked a blog post to a debate page. The point was to be able to group postings with more semantic richness than simple tags or categories.

It fell by the wayside, so I took it down after a few months. Recently I’ve been seeing sites pop up based on similar ideas. AllVoices is one, and Debategraph.org is another. It’s nice to see the idea of information richness continuing to develop in interesting ways.

And it makes me wish I had stuck with my site idea, though to be honest, it wasn’t realistically feasible. The hardest part wasn’t coding the functionality, which only took 2-3 weeks of the large pool of free time I had back then. (Side goals were to get a working knowledge of CherryPy and sqlalchemy, so at least those were accomplished!) No, the real difficulty was “selling” it to users: publicizing the site, making it visually attractive and user-friendly, and getting people to use it in their own blogs. I didn’t have the skills or resources to make those things happen.

There’s an adage that says success on the web largely depends upon execution, not the concept. That’s so true. I feel like I’ve known so many smart, talented technology people who excel at what they do but haven’t been able to pull off their interesting side projects. I think it’s because we often underestimate the non-technical challenges in getting a website off the ground. In many ways, those are more important to do well than solving the technological problems.