Some versions of CPAN (notably, the one that ships with Red Hat / CentOS 4.6, v1.7601) will automatically attempt to create a ‘Makefile.PL’ script if a module you’re trying to install through CPAN is missing one. However, sometimes this may lead to an error during the module installation, usually something like: “Too early to specify a build action ‘Build’. Do ‘Build Build’ instead.”. This appears to be caused by a missing argument to ExtUtils::MakeMaker’s WriteMakefile subroutine. If the ‘PL_FILES’ argument doesn’t exist, MakeMaker will incorrectly attempt to use the Build.PL file included with the module. Continue reading “Working with missing Makefile.PL scripts in CPAN modules”