ETOOBUSY 🚀 minimal blogging for the impatient
Loving The Alien
TL;DR
Sometimes you just get to love the Perl community and its Do What I Mean mindset.
For reasons I prefer to gloss over, I recently thought that I needed to install XML::LibXML in a local installation with Carton, and it ended up like this:
$ carton
Installing modules using ...
Successfully installed File-Which-1.23
Successfully installed PkgConfig-0.23026
Successfully installed FFI-CheckLib-0.26
Successfully installed File-chdir-0.1010
Successfully installed Path-Tiny-0.112
Successfully installed Test-Simple-1.302171
Successfully installed Capture-Tiny-0.48
Successfully installed Alien-Build-1.96
Successfully installed Sort-Versions-1.62
Successfully installed Mojo-DOM58-2.000
Successfully installed Alien-Libxml2-0.12
Successfully installed XML-NamespaceSupport-1.12
Successfully installed XML-SAX-Base-1.09
Successfully installed XML-SAX-1.02
Successfully installed XML-LibXML-2.0202
15 distributions installed
Complete! Modules were installed into ...
This is just amazing. I didn’t have the underlying library in my Debian system, but the whole system was set up to figure this out and install a privately compiled version to be consumed by XML::LibXML.
I sincerely thank the amazing people that make this possible - I mean, both Alien but also the whole toolchain!