Writing perl6 Programs using Rakudo Star: Can't install on OS X

Question

I'm trying to install Rakudo Star on OS X 10.6, and I've reached the always frustrating point where my build has failed and I'm not sure how to procede. Does anyone here know a way past this? (I'm trying to set this up to write some local perl6 programs, so I'm not sure if The Rules want this on Server Fault or on Stack Overflow, slap me as necessary)

I've downloaded the provided distribution and ran

make VERSION=2010.07

To successfully create an actual distribution in the folder

rakudo-star-2010.07

For anyone interested, I needed to grab the ports version of gnu find (installed to /opt/local/bin/gfind) and then alias my regular find to gfind. The OS X find lacks a -printf option.

That out of the way, per the READ me, I

$ cd rakudo-star-2010.07
$ perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot

This chugs along for a while, but then bails with the following

/Users/alanstorm/Downloads/rakudo-star-7652a0b/rakudo-star-2010.07/install/src/parrot/2.6.0/pmc/timer.dump
/Users/alanstorm/Downloads/rakudo-star-7652a0b/rakudo-star-2010.07/install/src/parrot/2.6.0/pmc/undef.dump
/Users/alanstorm/Downloads/rakudo-star-7652a0b/rakudo-star-2010.07/install/src/parrot/2.6.0/pmc/unmanagedstruct.dump
/Users/alanstorm/Downloads/rakudo-star-7652a0b/rakudo-star-2010.07/install/src/parrot/2.6.0/vtable.dump
Finished install_dev_files.pl

Reading configuration information from install/bin/parrot_config ...
===SORRY!===
Parrot revision r48225 required (currently r0)
To automatically build the version of Parrot that came with this
distribution (), try re-running Configure.pl with the 
'--gen-parrot' option.  Or, use the '--parrot-config' option to
explicitly specify the location of parrot_config to be used to
build Rakudo Star.

I found a simialr issue in these IRC logs: http://irclog.perlgeek.de/parrot/2009-05-11 but I'm not steeped enough in the project (or git) to understand what they did to solve it. My best guess is that it seems like a subversion revision number is supposed to be written to parrot_config (which is a binary looking file), and because the initial make (appeared to) use git to grab the file this didn't happen.

Also, after the perl Configure failed, I did have two new files named parrot_config.

find . -name parrot_config
./install/bin/parrot_config
./parrot-2.6.0/parrot_config

I tried running Configure.pl with the following flags, but each one ended up with the same "Sorry" message as referenced above?

perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot --parrot-config install/bin/parrot_config
perl Configure.pl install/bin/parrot_config
perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot --parrot-config parrot-2.6.0/parrot_config
perl Configure.pl --parrot-config parrot-2.6.0/parrot_config

Anyone here have any thoughts on next steps? If the answer is "ask the perl folks", do you have advice on the best place to do that?

Answer 1

You should never have to run make VERSION=2010.07 at all - that's the release manager's job.

Instead you should be downloading the tarball that make VERSION=2010.07 is supposed to create (but which doesn't seem to work on any platform besides linux at the moment).

This is the correct link: http://github.com/downloads/rakudo/star/rakudo-star-2010.07.tar.gz

Sorry for the confusion, we're still trying to document this better.

Answer 2

Turns our I had downloaded The Wrong Thing™. Downloading the premade distribution tarball at

http://github.com/downloads/rakudo/star/rakudo-star-2010.07.tar.gz

solved my problems. This compiled without a hitch. The folks in the #perl6 freenode room were super helpful in solving this one.

Answer 3

I was getting that error when I didn't have a subversion client installed. I even omitted the --gen-parrot and received a message that I shouldn't specify that flag.