Attempt to call undefined import method with arguments ("abs2rel") via package "File::Spec"

Question

I have Debian GNU/Linux trixie/sid and I installed publican from repo of debian. (publican is doing write and publish for DocBook)
When I run publican , It get the following messages:

Attempt to call undefined import method with arguments ("abs2rel") via package "File::Spec" (Perhaps you forgot to load the package?) at /usr/share/perl5/Publican/TreeView.pm line 12.
Duplicate specification "help" for option "help"
Can't open publican: No such file or directory at /usr/bin/publican line 646.

Version of my publican is 4.3.2-4.
Also I installed libfile-spec-native-perl package from repo.

Then I download source code via:

apt source publican

Then run publican and get the following error:

mohsen@debian:~/src-compiled/publican/publican-4.3.2/bin$ ./publican 
Attempt to call undefined import method with arguments ("abs2rel") via package "File::Spec" (Perhaps you forgot to load the package?) at /usr/share/perl5/Publican/TreeView.pm line 12.
Duplicate specification "help" for option "help"

Action required!

According to above Action Required! string added to output.

I don't know how do I solve it.
You make me happy if solved my problem.

Answer 1

The message "Attempt to call undefined import method..." is a warning introduced in Perl 5.40.0 (see perl5400delta). Older Perl versions didn't show this warning.

Nevertheless, the warning is correct in this case. File::Spec uses object orientation and doesn't export anything. The code in publican should instead use File::Spec::Functions. It's possible that ancinet versions of File::Spec exported the functions directly, but I can't find such a version in Perl's git history, because the source files were moved to a different location over the years.

It seems publican is very old and is not kept up to date with Perl. You can try changing the line

use File::Spec qw(abs2rel);

to

use File::Spec::Functions qw(abs2rel);

but it's possible you'll encounter additional similar problems.