Charles Lane wrote:
> Dan Sugalski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > At 12:19 PM 2/22/00 -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >>Jordan Henderson wrote:
> >>
> >> > Thanks. I guess I thought that a lot of these patches you
> >> > mentioned would have been folded into .660. I'll investigate
> >> > each and see if they are and I'll search the archives for others.
> >>
> >>If a patch appears on vmsperl it may be a "what do you folks think
> >>of this?" sort of thing. It needs to go to perl5-porters to be "official"
> >>and then there is no guarentee that it will be accepted.
> >
> > On the other hand, Sarathy's pretty cool about VMS-specific things, so
> > they're rarely not added.
>
> That's good. I recently started work on building .650 because the
> "stable" Perl release was too far behind on VMS-specific fixes. Hopefully
> the next "stable" Perl will have a lot of those fixes.
>
> I guess I should send my "TZ for pre 7.0 systems" patch from last
> summer on to Perl5-porters (a step I neglect far too often). Has
> anyone else here tested it?
(IIRC) I think I gave it a try and liked it.
> In the process of getting not only a clean build of .650 but also
> a clean suite of tests I've run across a number of problems ... most are
> the usual "unixisms in the test suite", but some are things that need
> fixed...the major one being subprocess handling in "safe_popen". It
> should be ready for release within a week, but right now there's still
> some lingering bugs.
>
> Meanwhile, I have a "Perl language" question that I hope someone can answer...
> in the t/lib/dprof.t test, there's a glob:
> sort(<lib/dprof/*_t lib/dprof/*_v>)
> that fails on VMS...I modified it to:
> sort(<lib/dprof/*_t>,<lib/dprof/*_v>)
> and then it works; apparantly the glob is handled in OP.C in a section of
> VMS-specific code, and it expects a single filespec.
>
> What I couldn't find in the docs was any indication that the originial
> form of glob was particularly "valid". Is it? I guess it works for
> *somebody*, otherwise it wouldn't be in the test suite, but it would
> be nice to have some idea as to valid format, separators, etc. if
> you're putting a list of filespecs in the glob.
I think that in the development branches of perl Unix and NT have switched to
using the xs module File::Glob for globbing as the internal glob. The code
from File::Glob was derived from BSD readdir() code. The reason is that unix
shells and various NT shells do not all agree on what glob syntax is and perl
used to be compiled in a way to run the shell's glob. I think that tcsh was
preferred over csh and csh was preferred over sh when Configuring the build of
perl on unix. So the new File::Glob::glob() implementation reduces
cross-platform incompatability where "cross-platform" in this case refers to
multiple unix implementations and NT.
> Which leads to the question: should the VMS-glob handle these "list of
> filespecs" globs, or should it be "don't do that in VMS"?
For cross platform compatability we might try to do the multi-glob, although
one has to be wary of the fact that they use whitespace and vms uses commas.
The problem for unix is that whitspace is a valid filename/dirname character.
The problem for VMS is that whitespace comes naturally in the
NODENAME"USER PASSWD"::DEVICE:[DIR]NAME.EXT;VERSION type file spec.
Peter Prymmer
