[Dxspider-support] spider on os x

[Dirk Koopman]

On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 10:07 +0000, Dirk Koopman wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 23:37 -0600, Steven Franke wrote:
> > After doing some more tests outside of spider, I determined that the 
> > Berkeley DB library as seen through DB_File was fundamentally broken on 
> > all three instances of OS X (Panther) 10.3.7 that I have access to. 
> > Databases can be created and examined, but the db gets scrambled when 
> > records are deleted. This explains the spider crashes that I have seen. 
> > The version of Berkeley DB on these machines is 1.5. Updating to 4.3 
> > (big jump!) and reinstalling DB_File seems to work - at least my small 
> > test scripts now produce sensible results. If I find out that this is 
> > not the solution, I'll send an update to the list.
> 
> 1.5? That is ancient!!! The generally accepted "public domain" version
> is 1.84 (or 1.85).
> 
> Using anything above 2.0 will be fine. A 4.x version will read
> 'old' (but just how old is unknown) versions of DB_Files without having
> to do manually do a 'perl user_asc'.
> 

and to reply to my reply: you will, almost certainly, have to compile up
a custom perl. As, I believe, DB_File is now part of the standard
distribution. 

However, if you can download a copy of the DB_File tarball from CPAN (or
even just do this in the DB_File directory of the latest perl tarball).
Extract the tarball (is still required), cd to the directory created,
perl Makefile.PL, make, make test, make install should update the
standard one that comes with OS-X. 

Dirk