The Perl module Math::BigInt::GMP is a wrapper around the GNU Multiple Precision arithmetic C library and is useful for certain other math-intensive Perl operations. Ominously, the C library page warns that “GMP is very often miscompiled! Please never use your newly compiled libgmp.a or libgmp.so without first running make check” which makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. However, I needed this lib.

On my Ubuntu linux machine, the Perl library (Math::BigInt::GMP) would not compile because of gmp was not installed. It would have been nice if the docs for this lib had mentioned this dependency. In any case, I install gmp with the following shell command:

apt-get install libgmp3-dev 

If prompted by apt-get to install additional dependencies, agree. Then go back and install Math::BigInt::GMP.

make clean; 
perl Makefile.PL && make test && make install

I’m beginning to think that entropy is enclosing around the Great Camel.