Yesterday evening, a friend of mine had some issues with installing DBD::mysql, and asked if I had encountered the same issue. The problem, as the output from make test showed, was that certain symbols was missing:

#     Tried to use 'DBD::mysql'.
#     Error:  Can't load '/Users/westerlund/src/perl/DBD-mysql-4.008/blib/arch/auto/DBD/mysql/mysql.bundle' for module DBD::mysql: dlopen(/Users/westerlund/src/perl/DBD-mysql-4.008/blib/arch/auto/DBD/mysql/mysql.bundle, 2): Symbol not found: _is_prefix

Fair enough, this is related to a 64-bit issue with MySQL—at least with my Perl version, which is now:

Summary of my perl5 (revision 5 version 10 subversion 0) configuration:
  Platform:
    osname=darwin, osvers=9.5.0, archname=darwin-thread-multi-64int-2level

If you try to link to a x86_64 version of MySQL, then you get the above mentioned error. So, I downloaded an x86 version of MySQL and tried again. The output from perl Makefile.PL:

  cflags        (mysql_config) = -I/Users/westerlund/src/perl/mysql-5.1.28-rc-osx10.5-x86/include  -g -Os -arch i386 -fno-common   -D_P1003_1B_VISIBLE -DSIGNAL_WITH_VIO_CLOSE -DSIGNALS_DONT_BREAK_READ -DIGNORE_SIGHUP_SIGQUIT  -DDONT_DECLARE_CXA_PURE_VIRTUAL
  embedded      (mysql_config) =
  libs          (mysql_config) = -L/Users/westerlund/src/perl/mysql-5.1.28-rc-osx10.5-x86/lib -lmysqlclient -lz -lm     -lmygcc
  mysql_config  (Users choice) = /Users/westerlund/src/perl/mysql-5.1.28-rc-osx10.5-x86/bin/mysql_config

That looks all good and nice, the right paths, versions and everything. So I compiled it OK, but when running make test again: (more…)