While building Python packages for Xvc with Maturin, I was receiving an error in GitHub Actions CI for Linux packages.

Can't locate IPC/Cmd.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /home/runner/work/xvc.py/xvc.py/target/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/release/build/openssl-sys-844a96d66ae533b1/out/openssl-build/build/src/util/perl /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 . /home/runner/work/xvc.py/xvc.py/target/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/release/build/openssl-sys-844a96d66ae533b1/out/openssl-build/build/src/external/perl/Text-Template-1.56/lib)

The issue seemed to be a missing Perl package. Building rust-openssl now appears to require the perl-core package.

I added apt-get update && apt-get install perl-core to the CI configuration, but that didn’t work.

However, as this GitHub issue comment suggests, Maturin with its manylinux support uses different kinds of Docker containers to build the packages. We must detect whether it is a CentOS or Debian-based container and install the missing packages accordingly.

The Building wheels step in the configuration should look similar to:

- name: Build wheels
  uses: PyO3/maturin-action@v1
  with:
    target: ${{ matrix.target }}
    manylinux: auto
    args: --release --out dist
    before-script-linux: |
      # If we're running on RHEL/CentOS, install needed packages.
      if command -v yum &> /dev/null; then
          yum update -y && yum install -y perl-core openssl openssl-devel pkgconfig libatomic

          # If we're running on i686, we need to symlink libatomic
          # in order to build openssl with the -latomic flag.
          if [[ ! -d "/usr/lib64" ]]; then
              ln -s /usr/lib/libatomic.so.1 /usr/lib/libatomic.so
          fi
      else
          # If we're running on a Debian-based system.
          apt update -y && apt-get install -y libssl-dev openssl pkg-config
      fi

This will run the specified script before executing the Maturin build command in the container, ensuring all missing packages are installed.