Using Ubuntu, how do I install DBD::Sybase from CPAN?

dbd, freetds, perl, sql-server, sybase

Solution

There are two ways to do that,

- (a) with the freetds that the distro provides

- or, (b) installing the vanilla freetds upstream and building against that.

The second option (b) is always possible, but then your system may have two different versions of freetds.

The first option can not be done without some hacking and the author will not fix it. He is simply hard headed and wants to fix internal structures to match the OS he uses rather than making it accepting of other configurations.

Internally `DBD::Sybase` expects there to be a directory, and a `$libdir` (a subdirectory with `lib` or `lib64`). The directories `DBD::Sybase` requires to build properly are not provided by the Debian package `freetds-dev`; the Debian package installs to `/usr/include` which doesn't have a `lib` or a `lib64` subdirectory. You can get around this by fooling `make` and recreating that structure, first make sure you have `freetds-dev` installed,

sudo apt-get install freetds-dev

Then link it to create a pseudo-package. On my 64 bit machine, it looks something like this.

mkdir /tmp/freetds
ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ /tmp/freetds/lib64
ln -s /usr/include /tmp/freetds/include/freetds

Now, it should work and you can build `DBD::Sybase` against system libraries.

sudo SYBASE=/tmp/freetds cpanp install DBD::Sybase

Viola.

Problem

Original source