At 7:10 PM -0400 7/22/04, Thomas Pfau wrote:
>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.
5.8.5 came out a couple of days ago but is unlikely to help with your
situation as no recent testing I'm aware of has been done on VAX or
on pre 7.x VMS.
>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.
Good golly. That sounds like a seriously useful bit of backporting
for folks in a similar situation. It shouldn't be too hard to
determine from the appropriate appendix to the CRTL manual what
particular #ifdefs should go around this code to get it into the
sources.
>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.
That should be a simple matter of adding lines similar to the
following in the BEGIN block of the test:
require Config; import Config;
if ($Config{'extensions'} !~ /\bTime\/HiRes\b/) {
print "1..0 # Skip: Time::HiRes was not built\n";
exit 0;
}
>Lastly, several tests failed. MMS TEST doesn't reveal much information about
>failures so I tried using harness.
harness is the canonical unixy way to get more details. The
idiomatic VMS way (documented in README.vms) is, for example:
$ @[.vms]test .exe "" -"v" [.op]pack.t
I hope they haven't broken harness on VMS since the last time I tried it.
>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?
Tie::File is heavily dependent on POSIX-compliant seek()
functionality in the CRTL. It's totally unsurprising that this
doesn't work in a version of VMS that is, what, 10 or 12 years old
and long since off the vendor's support matrix. As far as I know, no
other core packages depend on Tie::File, so if you don't intend to use it
explicitly, you should be fine.
The various math-related problems most likely come from D_FLOAT not
representing the floating point ranges that tests expect. Whether
this will cause you problems really depends on what sort of floating
point work you may be doing. You can try configuring with G_FLOAT
(instructions in README.vms) and see if that makes a difference. I
believe I was supposed to make G_FLOAT the default on VAX, but I
either got busy, forgot, decided I shouldn't without the ability to
test it, or all of the above.
--
________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
difficult than getting in."
Brad Leithauser
