ProjectAssist Installation Errors (part 2)

Having determined the cause of the maven issues, I moved on and cleaned up my system and restarted the install.

I then got perl errors, which the log listed as:

(13:22:49:671) Installing C:borlandprojectassistPerlsitelibNetLDAPExtensionWhoAmI.pm
(13:22:49:671) Perl install: processing INSTALL component AppConfig...
(13:22:53:609) Can't call method "ok" on an undefined value at c:/Borland/ProjectAssist/Perl/site/lib/PPM/UI.pm line 881, line 21.
(13:22:53:609) Perl install: ppm command did not succed (exitCode 1):
c:borlandprojectassistPerlbinperl -x -S PPM install c:borlandprojectassistbugzilla_perl_modulesAppConfig.ppd
(13:22:53:609) Perl install: processing INSTALL component Template-Toolkit...
(13:22:57:218) Can't call method "ok" on an undefined value at c:/Borland/ProjectAssist/Perl/site/lib/PPM/UI.pm line 881, line 17.
(13:22:57:218) Perl install: ppm command did not succed (exitCode 1):
c:borlandprojectassistPerlbinperl -x -S PPM install c:borlandprojectassistbugzilla_perl_modulesTemplate-Toolkit.ppd


Investigating this error, I see that the file: c:/Borland/ProjectAssist/Perl/site/lib/PPM/UI.pm does not exist. In fact, the PPM directory does not exist:


Directory of C:BorlandProjectAssistPerlsitelib

13/03/2007 01:41 p.m. <DIR> .
13/03/2007 01:41 p.m. <DIR> ..
13/03/2007 01:41 p.m. <DIR> auto
13/03/2007 01:41 p.m. <DIR> Bundle
13/03/2007 01:40 p.m. <DIR> Chart
13/03/2007 01:40 p.m. <DIR> Convert
13/03/2007 01:39 p.m. <DIR> Date
13/03/2007 01:40 p.m. <DIR> DBD
13/03/2007 01:40 p.m. <DIR> DBI
13/03/2007 01:40 p.m. <DIR> GD
13/03/2007 01:40 p.m. <DIR> Mail
13/03/2007 01:40 p.m. <DIR> Mysql
13/03/2007 01:41 p.m. <DIR> Net
13/03/2007 01:40 p.m. <DIR> PatchReader
13/03/2007 01:41 p.m. <DIR> ppm-conf
13/03/2007 01:39 p.m. <DIR> Time
So clearly the perl installer is missing some files. Could this be a proxy issue as well?

Investigating perl proxy issues, I discovered that perl (or at least ActiveState perl that ProjectAssist uses) requires an environment variable to define it’s PPM updating behavior

Set the http_proxy variable with the hostname or IP address of the proxy server:

  http_proxy=http://proxy.example.org

If the proxy server requires a user name and password, include them in the following form:

  http_proxy=http://username:password@proxy.example.org

If the proxy server uses a port other than 80, include the port number:

  http_proxy=http://username:password@proxy.example.org:8080

(taken from http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/docs/ActivePerl/5.8/faq/ActivePerl-faq2.html#ppm_and_proxies)

Having configured perl’s proxy, we can now continue.

I think this is another example of something that CodeGear should either heavily document, or do automatically. The install can read the eclipse proxy setting at runtime, so they could easily add an environment variable.