First you'll need the underlying Gnome libraries for XML (known as libxml2) and XSLT (known as libxslt or libxslt1). You can get these from www.libxml.org. Or if you're using Debian Linux, you can just apt-get the appropriate Debian packages:
(You need the *-dev packages as well as the libraries themselves because these contain the C header files that the Perl extensions will build against. You can almost certainly remove the *-dev packages after you've installed the Perl packages that build against them.)
No doubt Red Hat offers RPMs equivalent to these Debian packages; and other Linux and BSD distributions may offer the XML and XSLT libraries by means of similar packaging schemes.
Now you've got the underlying libraries installed, you need to build and install the following Perl modules, which provide fairly straightforward Perl interfaces to the C libraries.
I've taken local copies of the distributions of these modules that I used in developing zSQLgate XML transformation facility. You're welcome to fetch more up to date versions from CPAN, of course, but these tarballs constitute a known-good configuration:
zSQLgate itself only uses the last of these; but it is dependent, directly or indirectly, on all the other modules listed here.
I don't know how long this has been true, but with recent Debian versions and derivaties (I am using Ubuntu Linux 5.04), you can just do:
sudo apt-get install libxml-libxslt-perl
and all the prerequisites are taken care of, as they should be.
Feedback to
<mike@sql.z3950.org>
is welcome!