macOS bundle with perl (like for Windows)

[ribtoks]

Hi Phil

Just an idea to make exiftool work with macOS Big Sur where Apple will reportedly remove Perl (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-catalina-10_15-release-notes#3318257) together with Python/Ruby.

Maybe it'll be a good idea to bundle exiftool with Perl? This is done for Windows anyway.

Thanks,
Taras

[Hubert]

The public beta of Big Sur is available now, and on my setup (with the OS installed over Catalina, not a clean install) ExifTool runs fine. There do seem to be some issues with the installer, though - I shall do my best to report if they continue.

[ribtoks]

with the OS installed over Catalina, not a clean install

Thanks for your reply. There's a chance that you had perl inherited from Catalina so you don't see this problem.

[Hubert]

There's a chance that you had perl inherited from Catalina so you don't see this problem.

Indeed. But there's nothing in the current release notes for Big Sur Beta 3 at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-big-sur-11-beta-release-notes to indicate that Perl, or any other scripting languages, have actually been dropped. The Catalina release notes from last year that you linked to are quite vague:

Future versions of macOS won't include scripting language runtimes by default, and might require you to install additional packages

The only way to know for sure would be to run a clean install of Big Sur beta. Not something I'm inclined to do myself.

[Phil Harvey]

Keep me up to date, but I'm pretty sure that if Perl is dropped there will be convenient packages for installing it.  I'm hoping it won't become necessary to bundle it with ExifTool because that is something I would rather avoid.

- Phil

[Hubert]

Keep me up to date.

Will do. Reading between the lines, I think it's possible that the Perl packaged with MacOS may never be updated to v6 or v7. For now, ExifTool is running fine on my Customer Beta version of Big Sur.

[Phil Harvey]

It would be ideal if perl was never updated to Perl6 because ExifTool is not compatible with Perl6 and it is unlikely that it ever will be (it would require a substantial rewrite).

- Phil

[Hubert]

Fingers crossed is all I can say.

[steve1]

I recently installed exiftool via Homebrew, I am wondering if that helps this situation at all? I dont have any systems running Big Sur yet

There is also the conda package;

https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/exiftool

and its not ideal but there is always Docker as well..

[bigbri]

Just a f/u on the installation of ExifTool on Big Sur.

I am running 11.1 on an M1 mini. I did a fresh install (that's a whole other story).

Today I; 1) installed apple developer command line tools for Xcode 12.3 from here https://developer.apple.com/download/more/, 2) installed Perl from here:https://learn.perl.org/installing/osx.html and then 3) used the ExifTool install package. Happy to report all is well in media metadata land.

Now if the bluetooth would just fix itself.  Thanks for the great tool.

[Alan Clifford]

This evening's job.

Why do they do this.  It's an OS upgrade.  Why have they broken a user program.  Grumble grumble.

[Alan Clifford]

Hmm, why is a perlbrew installation neccessary when a later version of perl, when perl5.18, perl5.28 and perl5.30 already exist in /usr/bin ?

[Alan Clifford]

Removed perlbrew by changing ~/perl5/perlbrew/  ~/perl5/X-perlbrew/ and re-installed exiftool.

which perl now shows /usr/bin/perl.

So the only thing to do, I think, is to remove reference to perlbrew from .bashrc