A kit containing the Perl 5.6.1 final release, a selection of extensions, and a command procedure to build and install the whole shebang is available from: <http://members.telocity.com/craigberry/perlbuild.zip> The kit is about 8.3 MB. The prerequisites are: unzip, DEC/Compaq C, and MMK. (If you want to use MMS instead, just globally replace MMK in the command procedure BUILD_PERL.COM.) The basic steps to follow are: 1) unzip, and 2) run the procedure. Those steps would look something like this: $ unzip perlbuild.zip Archive: D0:[CRAIG.KITS]PERLBUILD.ZIP;1 inflating: [.perlbuild]build_perl.com extracting: [.perlbuild]libraries.zip extracting: [.perlbuild]modules.zip extracting: [.perlbuild]source.zip $ set default [.perlbuild] $ submit/noprint build_perl Job BUILD_PERL (queue SYS$BATCH, entry 15) started on SYS$BATCH The job has been taking me 2 1/2 hours to run on an AlphaStation 250 4/266. I've tried to use rooted logicals to avoid directory depth problems, but if you are on VAX or pre-7.2 Alpha, it's probably wise to unpack the kit as close to the root of your volume as you can. (I haven't had a chance to test on those platforms.) When the procedure completes, the directory tree [.perlbuild.perl...] will contain an installed snapshot of Perl and the extensions included in the kit. You can leave the installation where it is or use BACKUP to put it anywhere else. Just copy the PERL_SETUP.COM from the [.perlbuild] directory and modify the definition of PERL_ROOT contained therein to point to the final location. The snapshot is also suitable for zipping up and distributing as a pre-built binary. The list of modules I've included follows below. Sorry about omitting version numbers, but these have all been downloaded from CPAN recently and should be the latest. The module list is the intersection of "most requested" and "most functional on VMS." Unfortunately, for example, the current version of CPAN.pm just isn't working on VMS yet so it's not here even though several people expressed interest in it. I'm open to suggestions for adding to the list. DBI LIBNET DIGEST-MD5 HTML-TAGSET HTML-PARSER MIME-BASE64 URI LIBWWW-PERL MIME-LITE SMG VMS-DEVICE VMS-FILEUTILS VMS-FINDFILE VMS-ICC VMS-INDEXEDFILE VMS-LIBRARIAN VMS-LOCK VMS-MISC VMS-MONITOR VMS-PERSONA VMS-PRIV VMS-PROCESS VMS-QUEUE VMS-SYSTEM VMS-USER XML-PARSER Various notes and gotchas: With Compaq C V6.2-003 on OpenVMS Alpha V7.2-1 I only saw one test failure in Perl itself (pod/find.t, surprise, surprise). All the extensions built cleanly (well, DBI built messily but did get built), but there were a couple of test failures. These may be bugs/features of the test suites and not necessarily of the extensions. For instance, the VMS::Persona tests assume the existence of an ORACLE account and appear to need privs to run. I know I've seen the other modules pass all tests before, so they probably just need a bit of tweaking, but I haven't had time to take a look. I suspect they are as functional as they ever were. Here's where things stand now: libwww-perl Failed 3/22 test scripts, 86.36% okay. 27/286 subtests failed, 90.56% okay. VMS::Persona Failed 1/1 test scripts, 0.00% okay. 8/11 subtests failed, 27.27% okay. VMS::System Failed 1/1 test scripts, 0.00% okay. 1/7 subtests failed, 85.71% okay. BUILD_PERL.COM is *experimental* and is not likely to be the prettiest DCL you've ever seen, not to mention being lightly commented and undocumented (except for this message). The good news is that if it runs to completion you're going to have the best Perl you can get at the moment with minimal effort. Suggestions and patches are welcome. In addition to substituting MMS for MMK, there may be other modifications you want to make, such as changing the parameters passed to configure.com or adding your own extensions to the list. The procedure does accept two parameters, mostly untested. P1 can be an alternate root directory where you want Perl to be installed, much like the prefix parameter to Configure.com. Here's an example (trailing dot significant): $ submit build_perl.com/param=disk2:[utils.perl-5_6_1.] P2 is the stage of the procedure you want to start at. For example, if Perl has been successfully built and installed but you get hung up in the modules, you can try something like: $ submit build_perl.com/parameters=("","MODULES") to restart at the MODULES step (look in the procedure to see what the labels are). If you want to test a development release of Perl with the extensions included here, untar it, rename PERL.DIR to SOURCE.DIR, zip it up, and stick it in place of the SOURCE.ZIP included in this kit. Good luck, and let me know how you fare.
