More installation fun with ImageMagick

When I installed ImageMagick from source to install MagickWand, I broke the perl Image::Magick install.  So that the bugzilla checksetup.pl script broke on the check with the error message:

perl: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/auto/Image/Magick/Magick.so: undefined symbol: MagickCoreGenesis

So I needed to back out the manual ImageMagick build, or perl would be broken.  If that meant losing MagickWand, so be it.
A search for “how to uninstall perl modules” revealed some idiotic comments on the perl.beginners newsgroups to the effect that you’d never want to uninstall a perl module.  I originally attributed it to Randall Schwartz (author of Learning Perl), but in fact, though he was in the conversation, he only made technical clarification.

When an atrocious system like CPAN is your installer (or when you’re using anything that uses autoconf) you WILL want to uninstall something at some point.

Eventually, I decided the only solution I had was to run ‘make install’ again on the ImageMagick source distribution and see what it installed.

After a lot of analysis, it turned out to not be as bad as I thought.  I only had to remove two files:

# rm -r /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/Image/Magick*
# rm -r /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/auto/Image/Magick*

and  edit perllocal.pod

I found a nice script to clean up perllocal at perlmonks:

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=483020 

I then pruned the remaining Image::Magick sections from perllocal.pod and reinstalled the ImageMagick-perl-6.2.8 RPM.

I haven’t thoroughly tested it yet, but I believe both PerlMagick and MagickWand are still working, though I still have the two versions of ImageMagick.

I also removed the ImageMagick-devel-6.2.8 RPM.