After about nine years being subscribed to vmsperl and doing what little I can to keep the VMS port of Perl afloat, I had an experience tonight I've never had before. On an installed version of Perl 5.10.0 RC2 on OpenVMS Alpha v8.3 with an ODS-5 build disk, I typed:
$ cpanp -i "DBI" and after a bit of churning, a couple of warnings, and lots of test output, I got: Module 'DBI' installed successfully No errors installing all modules DBI, the Perl Database Interface extension, has historically been rather resistant to building and installing on VMS, yet just now I downloaded it, built it, passed its extensive test suite, and installed it with a single command. More than once in the past I've had to patch a new version just to get it to build. The current version is 1.601 and I haven't built it since about 1.48, so we owe some thanks to DBI author Tim Bunce and ExtUtils::MakeMaker maintainer Michael Schwern for steadily improving the build infrastructure. But I really want to single out Jos Bousmans, the CPANPLUS author, and John Malmberg, who did 99% of the porting to VMS, for all the work that made tonight's experiment possible. The original CPAN.pm never really worked on VMS, but obviously CPANPLUS does, and as of the almost-out 5.10 it is part of the Perl core. This means that something that has been taken for granted on other platforms for years is now finally here on VMS; we're in the best shape we've ever been to get real work done with Perl on VMS. There were some difficult moments, and I suspect John and Jos lost some hair and/or fingernails in the process, but the result is pretty impressive. To be honest, I expected a lot more work to be able to use CPANPLUS in the wild even though all its tests were passing, but obviously I underestimated the thoroughness of Jos's test suite. Schwern gave me a nudge a couple of years ago to look into CPANPLUS, something I never found time to do. Now I don't have to look into it, I can just use it, and so can you. I don't regard our work as finished, and DBI as a test case is good as far as it goes, but it is pretty self-contained, i.e., not much in the way of external dependencies. Most modern Perl modules have a rather long chain of dependencies, so we'll see what happens when we try some of those. I think my next experiment is going to be: $ cpanp -i "Catalyst" In case you haven't heard, Catalyst is the web framework all the cool kids are using these days, and it is a poster child for a module where nearly every piece is a plug-in or dependent module of some sort. I have no idea whether any of the pieces much less the whole will work on VMS, but just now I'm feeling optimistic. -- ________________________________________ Craig A. Berry mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] "... getting out of a sonnet is much more difficult than getting in." Brad Leithauser
