how to make gimp-perl-1.1.17 work?

[Paul Johnson <pauljohn ukans edu>]

On this site:
> ftp://wacko.gxsnmp.org/pub/RPMS/
 
I found some rpms for gimp-1.1.17, and I've built gimp on a few machines
and it takes forever, so I decided to try these rpms.  The one causing
me problems is the gimp-perl addon, which installs gimp stuff into 
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl, which unfortunately is not in my perl path in
RedHat 6.1. At run time, the errors in the xterm look like so:

** WARNING **: wire_read: unexpected EOF (plug-in crashed?)
Can't locate Gimp.pm in @INC (@INC contains:
/usr/lib/perl5/5.00503/i386-linux /usr/lib/perl5/5.00503
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/i386-linux /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005
.) at /usr/lib/gimp/1.1/plug-ins/xachvision line 9.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at
/usr/lib/gimp/1.1/plug-ins/xachvision line 9.

I've rebuilt the SRC.RPM files for the gimp, and this problem goes away,
but I hoped to understand better what goes wrong with the rpm as it is
found on wacko.  In the perl man page, I found the place to add a
directory to an environment variable so perl could find Gimp.pm, and it
did find Gimp.pm after that, but unfortunately something was missing,
probabaly because the modules themselves could not find the files they
were looking for.

I did this:
#export PERL5LIB=$PERL5LIB:/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/
Then 
#gimp

and the error output a ton of things like this 

** WARNING **: wire_read: unexpected EOF (plug-in crashed?)
Can't load '/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl//i386-linux/auto/Gimp/Gimp.so' for
module Gimp: /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl//i386-linux/auto/Gimp/Gimp.so:
undefined symbol: Perl_markstack_ptr at
/usr/lib/perl5/5.00503/i386-linux/DynaLoader.pm line 169.

 at /usr/lib/perl5/5.00503/Carp.pm line 22
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl//Gimp.pm
line 22.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at
/usr/lib/gimp/1.1/plug-ins/xachshadow line 31.

** WARNING **: wire_read: unexpected EOF (plug-in crashed?)
Can't load '/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl//i386-linux/auto/Gimp/Gimp.so' for
module Gimp: /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl//i386-linux/auto/Gimp/Gimp.so:
undefined symbol: Perl_markstack_ptr at
/usr/lib/perl5/5.00503/i386-linux/DynaLoader.pm line 169.

 at /usr/lib/perl5/5.00503/Carp.pm line 22
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl//Gimp.pm
line 22.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at
/usr/lib/gimp/1.1/plug-ins/xachvision line 9.

The perl man page does say I ought to just recompile for my system, and
I can do it, but it just surprises me that it is so stubborn!

-- 
Paul E. Johnson                       email: pauljohn@ukans.edu
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700