catalyst mvc reducks on osx

Yeah, I'm back at hacking MVC after having blogged abut it over a year back. I tried the Rails and I lorved, but didn't have much of a chance to muck with it. Turns out that Perl, though icky in many respects syntactically, is just more prevalent and the user-base is just that much more active than Ruby. Seemingly.

Anyway, now I need to build a quick and dirty and maintainable (ha, oxymoron in most cases) database app that's web-connected for my current gig. It'll have to be maintained by mostly non-techies. So I'm thinking MVC is a necessity. The few techies who *can* work on maintenance duties are self-taught Perl "programmers". Note the quotes, and keep Chris Farley in mind.

Building Catalyst for OSX (my OS of choice at present, when my Ubuntu host is not available) is turning out to be much more of a nightmare than building a rails app ever was. The standard issue:

perl -MCPAN -e 'install Catalyst;'

bombed with many errors. Then I found out that macports had a lot of this already port'ed, so to speak. Doing some

sudo port install p5-catalyst-*

should have made for a lot of happy-happy-joy-joy (which, incidentally, dates me), but it too fails with silliness like:

Error: Target org.macports.activate returned: Image error: /opt/local/bin/corelist already exists and does not belong to a registered

So, I'm currently debating whether to continue the struggle to make this work, or just give up. Obviously I'm not going to give up, but this really is unfortunate. Why the HELL does it have to be so hard to install something like this? I'm trying to figure out if Apple is to blame, Catalyst is wonky, or my machine is just so mucked up with all the crap I've been installing that things are just totally out of whack.

Now it seems that the fact that I installed some of the modules using CPAN and the rest using macports is actually causing some confusion to one or the other (I guess their databases aren't too intelligent). So I'm having to encounter errors, then continue installation in spite of the snafu's and I'm hoping that this ultimately leads to an actually working install!

In any case, this is what I'm going to be having upleasant dreams about tonight!