On Sat, Oct 28, 2000 at 09:53:23PM +0100, Richard Proctor wrote:
> On Sat 28 Oct, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> > On Sat, Oct 28, 2000 at 08:10:18PM +0100, Richard Proctor wrote:
> > > On Sat 28 Oct, James Taylor wrote:
> > > > PS. Is anyone working on a port of Perl 5.6 ?
I think the answer is "I intend to resume working to get 5.005_03 finished"
By "finished" I mean tidy up the things I think I know how to do but didn't
make work (clean build process, MakeMaker (hopefully (and therefore CPAN),
zip files using sfio)
Assuming 5.005_04 comes out I will port that too, as it will be easily
diff-able from 5.005_03
> > I'm about to see if I can get sfio2000 ported (sfio98 was mostly done about
> > 2 years ago) as it's better than UnixLib stdio, and allows more reliable
> > sticking of libraries in zip files. Which is probably going to be wanted
> > as an option for size reasons (as well as long filenames and 77 directory
> > entry limits) as with Unicode current bleading edge perl has 7408522 bytes
> > of files in the lib directory.
>
> Worth doing, though with RO4, it is less of an issue.
I found something scary. On 5.6 (or later)
"man perltodo | grep -A2 Nicholas" gives:
Nicholas Clark ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) had a patch for storing
modules in zipped format. This needs exploring and concluding.
It would actually be useful for distributing scripts with all the
modules they need.
The man page entry comes as a result of sending version 3 of the zip
patch to perl5-porters about 18 months ago. The patch works 100% with
sfio on Unix (solves the DATA handle problem). For RISC OS all that's
needed is a sfio port, which I intend to do. For the core there were
other issues still unresolved. (mostly IO disciplines, which are sort
of happening now as they are sort of essential to make Unicode input/
output work at all. Hmm. did I say I didn't like 5.6? :-()
> > Personally I'm not using 5.6 for production purposes (on Unix) because
> > rather too much of Unicode support is a mess, (and it's not an compile
> > time option to disable it). 5.6.1 should be considerably better (but
> > not perfect), but 5.6.1 doesn't seem to be very happening.
> > [5.6.1 is effectively going to be bug fixes back-patched from the 5.7
> > tree]
> Neither am I. One site I manage still has 5.004... Though I admit to having
> 5.6 on my laptop - I had to reload recently and just loaded most recent.
I've been tracking 5.7.1:
rsync -avz --delete rsync://ftp.linux.activestate.com/perl-current/
/mnt/six/src/bleadperl
and been somewhat more active on unix perl than RISC OS.
Nicholas Clark
