Charles Lane wrote:

[warning: line breaks may be broken in this email response]
> I don't know about the rest of you, but when I'm building Perl over
> and over I get rather tired of having to do the whole CONFIGURE.COM
> dialog manually.
>
> The "-des" option is a help, but only if you want a "standard" version,
> and I almost always want non-standard, at least to the extent of
> a VMS-debug enabled version.
>
> The following patch makes many of the CONFIGURE.COM options
> selectable via command-line -D or -U options. For example, my favorite
> choices would be:
>     @CONFIGURE "-Dusedevel" "-Dusevmsdebug" "-des"
>
> So that the "use..." options now available now include:
>     usevmsdebug
>     useperldebug
>     usemultiplicity
>     usethreads
>     useithreads
>     usecasesensitve
>     useieee
>     usesecurelog
>     usedefaulttypes
>
> in addition to the previously available:
>     usedevel
>     use64bitint
>     use64bitall
>     usemymalloc
>     useperlio

These lists ought to go into README.vms since global symbols like:

   $ usevmsdebug == "define"

will affect the build.  (Sebastian Bazley will be upset otherwise).
It would be necessary to SEARCH configure.com f$type to route most out (that
will turn up some false positives though).

I think that usedevel is supposed to remain undocumented though... not sure
(didn't I see a p5p patch that added it to the main INSTALL file?).

> The patch doesn't change any of the defaults.
>
> diff -uBb configure.com-orig configure.com
> --- configure.com-orig       Thu Oct 25 22:13:29 2001
> +++ configure.com       Thu Oct 25 22:13:21 2001
> @@ -2181,6 +2181,7 @@
>  $ echo "perl itself.  This can be a useful feature if you are "
>  $ echo "embedding perl in a program."
>  $ dflt = "n"
> +$ if f$type(usevmsdebug) .nes. "" .and. usevmsdebug .eqs. "define" then dflt="y"

Great - I am glad to see use being made of these things in configure.com.

[snip]
> +$ if f$type(usemultiplicity) .nes. "" .and. usemultiplicity .eqs. "define" then 
>dflt = "y"
>  $ rp = "Build Perl for multiplicity? [''dflt'] "
>  $ GOSUB myread
>  $ IF ans.eqs."" then ans = dflt
> -$ IF ans
> +$ IF F$EXTRACT(0, 1, F$EDIT(ans,"COLLAPSE,UPCASE")) .eqs. "Y"
>  $ THEN
>  $   usemultiplicity="define"

Why the change from C<IF ans> to
C<IF F$EXTRACT(0, 1, F$EDIT(ans,"COLLAPSE,UPCASE")) .eqs. "Y"> ?
I had in fact wanted to go through configure.com and change all, or at least most such
to the C<IF ans> form.  I thought that allowing folks to answer "0" or "1" might help 
them
(e.g. if they cannot answer "OUI"|"NON" or "SI"|"NO" - at least these don't work
on North American English DCL).

It will take a bit of work but perhaps we ought to stick the
C<$ IF ans.eqs."" then ans = dflt> statement into the GOSUB myread target.  The
equivalent myread shell script on Unix does have that set in place.  A few of the
answer handlers would need to be rewritten in configure.com in order to affect such
a change though.

Peter Prymmer


Reply via email to