Anyone still using OpenVMS/VAX 6.2?

[Thomas Pfau]

At work, our application still runs on VMS 6.2 on VAX systems.  I 
installed perl 5.8.0 last year and don't remember having any problems.  
Alas, I must have deleted the source tree after a successful build 
because I can't find them or any traces of the build other than the 
PERL_ROOT directory tree.

Anyway, I recently found SIMH (http://simh.trailing-edge.com/) and 
decided to give it a workout.  I figured I'd install 6.2 first since 
that's the version I'm familiar with and maybe later I could move to 
7.3.  A new VMS install needs a new perl install so I figured I'd try to 
build 5.8.4.  I hit errors during the build on both SIMH and the real 
VAXen at work.

The first problem I hit during the build was an attempt to use 
ioctl(SIOCATMARK).  VMS 6.2 doesn't support ioctl().  I ended up writing 
a vms_siocatmark() function using a QIO to plug into [.ext.io]io.xs.

The second problem was with Time::HiRes.  Although VMS 6.2 does not have 
many (if any) of the functions needed by this module, it's included in 
the default list of modules to build.  I reconfigured without this 
module but the test phase still tried to reference it.

Lastly, several tests failed.  MMS TEST doesn't reveal much information 
about failures so I tried using harness.  There were several things 
along the lines of 'unrecognized command verb \ECHO\' but also some real 
failures.  op/pack failed with what appears to be a floating point 
overflow.  Several Tie::File, Math::BigInt and Math::BigRat tests 
failed.  I can post the errors from the build logs if anyone is interested.

Does anyone know if any of these errors are serious?  Are they worth 
looking into or am I the last diehard still trying to use perl on 
VAX/VMS 6.2?