Craig Barry wrote in reply to me:
!The problem I reported goes away when building on an ODS-2 disk or
!when unpacking the Perl archive in such a way that all the filenames
!are upcased even when the files are created on an ODS-5 volume. It
Darn. I ought to have mentioned that I was using an ODS-2 volume
for all of my testing.
!appears that MMS is case sensitive at least part of the time either
!when applying rules or when parsing user-defined rules. I suspect
!this behavior is unintentional and there has just never been
!sufficient testing of MMS on ODS-5 disks with mixed-case filenames.
That's EDS software support for you... :-(
!Perl could try harder to specify dependencies explicitly and leave
!less to be inferred by the rule engine. It could also state the
!rules in every possible combination of case, so, for example, you'd
!have
!
!.c.xs
!.C.XS
!.c.XS
!.C.xs
.c.Xs
.c.xS
.C.Xs
.C.xS
Hello combinatorial explosion (I would however doubt those
latter are really needed though). Isn't case insensitive
MMK going to get mad about rules being redefined (analogous to
the macro redefinition error)? I have done a rudimentary test
with mmk V3.9-6 and the answer appears to be "no" but I
think that some ODS-5 specific changes have been introduced
in later versions of MMK including 3.9-6.
!But that's a pretty verbose and ugly way to go. Since the weakness
!appears to be in MMS and there is a workaround, I'm inclined to say
!we should just document the workaround and leave it that.
It might be good to have a mention in at least readme.vms
since the behavior could effect CPAN module building, even
for a perl.exe that was built and installed on an ODS-2
volume. In the meantime I'll submit my proposed change
to vms/descrip_mms.template to address the $(MMSQUALIFIER)
double quotation mark removal issue.
Peter Prymmer
