Marty,
I'm moving this to the vmsperl list as others may be interested or
have helpful suggestions.
>I've been looking for a "VMS Bigot's Guide to
>What This Perl Stuff is All About" but haven't found it, yet.
I'm sure it's just awaiting a sufficiently committed true believer to
write it ;-). There is a Perl section in the OpenVMS FAQ, with
pointers to a number of other places. The best sites I know of are
<http://www.sidhe.org/vmsperl> and <http://www.crinoid.com>.
>I've actually had some luck with MIME::BASE64, DEVEL::Symdump,
>Crypt-DES, HTML::Parser, HTML::Tagset, URI, and Digest::MD5.
>
>I'm flailing on XML::Parser 2.30, since it requires expat 1.95.1,
>which doesn't have the standard makefile.pl like the rest of the
>packages mentioned before. The closest I've found is some notes
>in the vmsperl mail archive that say to change makefile.pl and
>descrip.mms with "insert stuff here".
That method died a natural death after, IIRC, XML::Parser 2.28, which
included expat. With the current versions (the ones you have) you
build expat, which is not a Perl module at all, separately, and tell
XML::Parser where to find it by passing the appropriate parameters to
Makefile.PL on the command line. The changes to the standard
distributions of both expat and XML::Parser for VMS are at
<http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/vmsperl/2001-01/msg00032.html>.
After applying these changes using GNU patch (available at
crinoid.com) you'll want to go to the [.lib] directory of the expat
distribution and simply do MMK. Once you've built expat, you will
need to set up the build for XML::Parser as follows:
$ perl Makefile.PL "EXPATLIBPATH=disk1:[expat-1_95_1.lib]" -
"EXPATINCPATH=disk1:[expat-1_95_1.lib]"
where you supply your own device and directory. Proceed with MMK,
MMK TEST, and MMK INSTALL. expat is never directly installed on your
Perl distribution since it gets linked into XML::Parser.
>I haven't had much luck with Apache::Sessions, Storable, or DBI,
>but I haven't beat on them sufficiently to get annoyed with them,
>yet. Give me time, I'll get peeved with them, too, I'd guess.
Storable will have some problems because the fwrite() replacement in
Perl's vms.c doesn't handle binary data that may have null bytes in
it. We've fixed this since 5.005_03; you might search for
my_fwrite() in the archives and patch up your vms.c if you are
building your own Perl. Ah, here's where the patch is:
<http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/vmsperl/2000-09/msg00140.html>.
DBI does work, but has an acute resistance to being made; usually
MMK ALL followed by MMK TEST is the appropriate therapy. I haven't
tried Apache::Sessions. Do post specific questions to vmsperl, and
good luck.
--
____________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
