Curse you CPAN! (LIBXML2_2.6.0 not defined)

If you have seen the following error, possibly starting up Apache2 on your Linux box and you can’t for the life of you figure out why.. it MIGHT just be CPAN as the ultimate culprit. There is a good chance you may have a conflicting version of libxml2 in /usr/local/lib probably with a bunch of other libs too. As I didn’t install these myself, the only tool I can think of that will have done will be CPAN when a package has been installed via it.

Thankfully the fix is simple, remove the libs from /usr/local/lib that are conflicting, and don’t use CPAN 🙂

This may break your Perl module it installed, but hopefully will restore the usability of your system. My recommendation would be to only use packaged versions of your Perl modules to ensure system integrity, save you some headaches later in life.