The Perl 5.10.0 source distribution is currently propagating to its canonical download locations (see below). The initial announcement on the perl5-porters mailing list is here:
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2007/12/msg131636.html and there will be other announcements in other forums. In this forum I thought I would point out some of the highlights and gotchas for VMS users, but you'll also want to look at README.vms and [.vms]perlvms.pod in the source distribution. But first, a big thanks to John Malmberg, who is responsible for dragging us kicking and screaming into the 21st century with support for large files, hard links, symbolic links, long filenames, filenames with ODS-5 escape characters, the ability to run the Perl debugger in a separate xterm window, and probably a number of other goodies I'm forgetting at the moment. In thanking John I've given a quick preview of new features specific to VMS. We also have initial but still incomplete support for many of the DECC$* feature logical names, and we take advantage of various new CRTL features, such as the ability to emulate flock() with the locking flags in fcntl(). Threaded builds are now linked with multiple kernel threads and upcalls enabled, and large file support is now the default on 64-bit architectures. 5.10.0 builds just fine on VAX, Alpha, and Itanium. Most recent development and testing has taken place on the current released version of VMS with the latest or second-latest C compiler. However, you'll probably be ok building with anything VMS v7.0 and later and DEC C v6.0 and later. Building on an ODS-5 volume is recommended where available but not required (you will see additional test failures on ODS-2). Top 3 gotchas for the build: 1.) If building on ODS-5, rename perl-5^.10^.0.DIR to perl-5_10_0.DIR after unpacking the tarball but before building. 2.) If you have a "BIN" logical name in your environment, delete it before running the test suite as it will confuse a number of the tests. (N.B. GNV defines BIN by default) 3.) Many test scripts are sensitive to the environment and do things like check for the presence of an internet connection or an external utility to determine whether particular tests can be run; when troubleshooting test failures, bear in mind that this preliminary check -- rather than the test itself -- may be the problem. The canonical download location for the Perl source tarball is here: http://www.cpan.org/src/README.html It may take a few days for 5.10.0 to appear there, but in the meantime you can get it from: http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/R/RG/RGARCIA/perl-5.10.0.tar.gz Enjoy! -- ________________________________________ Craig A. Berry mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] "... getting out of a sonnet is much more difficult than getting in." Brad Leithauser
