Comments on: Mac OS X Security Update 2009-01 Fix for Perl and Fink

By: Teilo

Teilo — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:18:10 +0000

For the record: Anyone who had the Storable problem, and has upgraded the Storable module in any way, you could run into trouble with the scanpackages.db file. In my case, Perl was pegging the CPU every time fink was trying to run scanpackages.

The fix is simple:

rm /sw/var/lib/fink/scanpackages.db

fink scanpackages

By: mattmichielsen

mattmichielsen — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 01:00:17 +0000

Thanks for the quick fix info. Like the other commenter, I agree that Apple should use a package manager (preferably dpkg/apt) for at least base system packages. I can understand that they like to keep user-level applications in their own .App directories.

By: Teilo

Teilo — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 01:38:10 +0000

This was so bad, that nothing I tried worked. Manually building and installing Storable was a no-go. (Isn’t Storable built in to Perl 5.8 already?). I finally gave up, and rebuilt Fink from scratch. Very painful. And now, it locks up every time it is scanning the package list at the end of an install. Thanks for nothing, Apple.

There should be a way to completely blow away Apple’s Perl build and reinstall it – but since they bundle it with OS and Security updates, there’s no way I have found to do this. Apple needs to move to some sort of package-based update system – even if only for the Unix/X packages.