At 2:04 PM -0400 9/24/03, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >It has only recently been reported that >a perl build might have trouble on ODS-5. >Although I recall testing it a few years ago >I suspect things might have changed and I only >recently ran into the problem when extracting >perl-5.8.1-RC5.tar.gz onto an ODS-5 >volume (the release kits that unpack into >perl.dir do not exhibit the problem the same >way that a perl-5^.8^.1-RC5.dir does).
All filenames in the Perl distribution are ODS-2 safe except for the name of the top-level directory, whose multiple dots in the portion containing the Perl version number cause the problem you note. The problem was not evident before vmstar acquired its ODS-5 capabilities about 2 years ago. (Archives created with zip, for example, do not run into the same trouble.) It can be avoided by using the -o or /ODS2 switch with vmstar, thus forcing the name of the top-level directory (and everything else) to be ODS-2 safe. The problem can also be avoided by simply renaming the top-level directory to something that is ODS-2 safe. N.B. vmstar pays no attention to the current parse style, but simply defaults to using ODS-5 names on ODS-5 volumes. Naturally it would be better if Perl handled properly those names that are illegal in ODS-2 but legal in ODS-5 -- multiple dots are just a subset of the otherwise illegal characters that are allowed on ODS-5 when preceded by a caret. <snip> >(See attached file: ods5_0.patch) > >Does this seem like a viable approach that should >be further pursued? I doubt that a change like this could >make it into 5.8.1, but I don't know that for sure. The approach has some merit in that it appears to handle an important special case. I think what we really need, though, is a rewrite of all the file specification parsing code with an eye toward handling all the wrinkles that come with ODS-5. Most likely this would involve more aggressive use of sys$parse, but I haven't really given that a close look yet. There is nothing new about the problem and it became an issue because of a change in vmstar, not a change in Perl, so I really can't think of a valid argument for trying to fix it in in RC5 of 5.8.1, though documenting the workarounds as far as getting Perl built would be nice. -- ________________________________________ Craig A. Berry mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] "... getting out of a sonnet is much more difficult than getting in." Brad Leithauser
