I’m posing this question to you in front of the whole mailing list, just in case someone out there can help us both. As you know, I’m the official Macports maintainer of the port demeter, in spite of my near-complete ignorance of how either Perl or Macports work.

In February, I filed a Macports ticket to make their preferred perl (5.26) work with Demeter 0.9.25. It was a simple matter of adding the “-I.” argument, as you pointed out to me. They pulled my changes, or whatever they do over there. My next step is to update the Macports package information to upgrade from Demeter 0.9.25 to 0.9.26.

I am having a problem when I try to build Demeter 0.9.26, however. The “./Build install” command says it cannot find or copy ‘src/Ifeffit.dylib’. Do the following give you any clues about why that might be? This might be too little information, but as you said, “ask early”.

The following text shows how it goes when I try to build within the macports structure. I get the same error, though, when I clone the git repository, cd into it, run “perl -I. Build.PL”, and then try to run “sudo ./Build install”. It looks as if somehow an ifeffit directory variable is not being initialized properly in line 308 of DemeterBuilder.pm.

fowlerj@817jfmac:demeter-0.9.26$ ll /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.26/darwin-thread-multi-2level/auto/Ifeffit/Ifeffit.dylib

-r-xr-xr-x  1 macports  wheel  33008 Mar  5 09:05 /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.26/darwin-thread-multi-2level/auto/Ifeffit/Ifeffit.dylib

fowlerj@817jfmac:demeter-0.9.26$ port installed ifeffit

The following ports are currently installed:

  ifeffit @1.2.13_5+gcc7 (active)

[Mac ports would normally run the following commands within its build script, of course. But

 I am isolating the failed command to see if makes more sense this way.]

fowlerj@817jfmac:demeter-0.9.26$ pushd /opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_macports_release_tarballs_ports_science_demeter/demeter/work/demeter-0.9.26

fowlerj@817jfmac:demeter-0.9.26$ sudo ./Build install

Use of uninitialized value $iffdir in pattern match (m//) at DemeterBuilder.pm line 308.

Simple test for presence of gnuplot ---> found it!  Using gnuplot with the wxt terminal.

Building Demeter

Can't copy('src/Ifeffit.dylib', 'blib/arch/auto/Ifeffit/Ifeffit.dylib'): No such file or directory at /opt/local/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.26/Module/Build/Base.pm line 5601.