Installation of Perl 6 following https://perl6.org/downloads/ isn't without pain

[HaraldJoerg]

During the German Perl Workshop, I tried to install Perl 6 on a new notebook on both Windows and Linux, and on both systems missing dependencies got in the way. The actual task was to get Perl 6 and Inline::Perl5 up and running, to allow a somewhat smooth migration.

• On Windows, installing the .msi was fast and just fine. But running 'zef install zef', as recommended on https://perl6.org/downloads/, failed because the system had no idea how to deal with a .tar.gz file. Guesswork was that maybe an installation of 7-zip or Strawberry Perl could have helped, but I didn't verify this.
• On Linux (Debian Stretch), the quick start procedure from https://perl6.org/downloads/ is not actually "quick" but eventually succeeded (why the heck must I run configure as root??). However, 'zef install Inline::Perl5' failed with several screenfuls of error messages. Luckily timotimo was close and helped me to scroll back through the screens to the point where it complained that perl-dev (libperl-dev on Debian) was missing.

So, finally, I got it up and running. But without timotimo's support I probably would have postponed Perl 6 for a (another) year or so... Adding these prerequisites to the recipes on https://perl6.org/downloads/ would help a lot!

[nxadm]

@HaraldJoerg,

For Linux there are native packages available, although the link to https://github.com/nxadm/rakudo-pkg#rakudo-pkg (top right) is very easy to miss.

C.