On Feb 15, 2021, at 5:07 PM, Miller, Edward S. via vmsperl <vmsperl@perl.org>
wrote:
>
> We have recently installed PERL v5.32.1 on our Alpha VMS 8.3 system using the
> distribution from PERL.ORG.
> The README.VMS suggests that:
> "Regardless of how confident you are, make a bug report to the VMSPerl
> mailing list."
Thanks for the report. Haven't had many lately.
> This is not really a complete bug report, but more a summary of my experience
> doing the install
> and an attempt to find out whether anyone is really interested in a more
> specific 'bug report'.
>
> As far as we can tell, the install for us was successful. Our user who
> reported that his code would not
> work with our old perl version (5.004_04) reports that it now works with the
> newly installed v5.32.1.
Wow. 5.004_04 was from 1997, so that's a big jump.
> I have one change to the readme.vms I would strongly suggest: state
> unequivocally that the install procedures should
> be done using an ODS-5 disk, and that you are (very likely?) wasting your
> time attempting it on an ODS-2 disk.
> (In our case the first MMK operation failed eventually--in two different
> ways, with two different MMK versions--
> using an ODS-2 disk.)
Fair enough. Things go from possible to not recommended to just won't work and
the docs don't always keep up. README.vms does say the following:
------
ODS-5 and Extended Parse
All development and testing of Perl on VMS takes place on ODS-5 volumes with
extended parse enabled in the environment via the command C<SET
PROCESS/PARSE=EXTENDED>.
Latent support for ODS-2 volumes (including on VAX) is still present, but the
number
of components that require ODS-5 features is steadily growing and ODS-2 support
may be
completely removed in a future release.
------
That's not strictly true anymore either as VAX support is long gone. So yes,
there are some documentation updates needed.
> The step @configure "-des" was apparently successful (assuming the many
> "NOT found" messages are benign).
It will find more things on v8.4 than v8.3 (which is now a pretty old release)
and even more things on v8.4-2 with the C99 patch applied. It's normal to have
some things not found.
> The first "MMK" step had several "%CC-I" compiler messages, the most
> suspicious of which was
>
> neg = PL_statcache.st_ino < 0;
> ..................^
> %CC-I-QUESTCOMPARE, In this statement, the unsigned expression
> "PL_statcache.st_ino" is being compared with a relational
> operator to a constant whose value is not greater than zero. This might
> not be what you intended.
> at line number 2949 in file DISK$ORACLE5:[PERL.perl-5^.32^.1]pp_sys.c;1
That line of code is guarded like so:
CLANG_DIAG_IGNORE_STMT(-Wtautological-compare);
GCC_DIAG_IGNORE_STMT(-Wtype-limits);
neg = PL_statcache.st_ino < 0;
GCC_DIAG_RESTORE_STMT;
CLANG_DIAG_RESTORE_STMT;
We could add equivalent pragmas to make the VMS C compiler ignore it as well
but I question whether it's worth 10 lines of code to negate a warning on one
line of code. The author of that line insists that it's idiomatic C and
there's nothing wrong with it.
>
> The step "MMK test" completed and summarized its results with
> "Failed 58 tests out of 2350, 97.53% okay."
>
> I ran the procedure to get details of some of these failures using
> $ @[.vms]test .EXE "" -"v" (filespec)
> However I was successful in getting the proper syntax for (filespec) only
> for those that were originally
> reported as FAILED with a file specification that started with "t/", not
> the others.
58 failures is on the high side but as I said, VMS v8.3 is pretty old and I
haven't built on it in years. It's problematic that the test driver doesn't
work for tests outside of the [.t] directory. If you give me an example it's
possible I could spot a way to run it.
> The step "MMK install" was apparently successful (assuming the many "Can't cd
> to (cpan/IO-Compress/) xxx.tmp: no such file or directory"
> messages are benign).
I believe they are benign as far as getting things installed. There is a bug
in something IO::Compress uses (I think it's File::Temp) that causes the
warning but it doesn't seem to prevent it from working.
>
> A thanks to all of those who contributed to making PERL functional on VMS
> systems.
>
> -- Ed Miller SLAC NAL.
________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
difficult than getting in."
Brad Leithauser
