Go nuclear on Gentoo’s Perl

It had been several weeks since I’d last updated my Gentoo machine, and I found that several GNOME packages were failing with the following error:

checking for XML::Parser... configure: error: XML::Parser perl module is required for intltool

After exploring the usual avenues of revdep-rebuild and re-emerging the XML-Parser and expat, no complete solution to the failed updates was found.

Gentoo comes armed with the perl-cleaner utility that allows easy rebuilding of Perl-dependent packages.

It was time to get nuclear. Rather than fiddling around, trying to find the offending bad links and modules, I simply used:

perl-cleaner --reallyall

After rebuilding over 200 Perl-dependent packages, many of which were virtual packages and involved no actual compilation, and giving the machine an hour or so to complete the process, the GNOME updates emerged without any further issues.

Such are the ways of a source-based distribution.