how to set up !Perl

Dear RISC OS Perl friends,

May I ask your help for setting up !Perl on my Risc PC with Select.

In the past few years I have done some Perl programming under Linux. I was
glad to see that Perl is available for RISC OS, so I copied it from the
latest Foundation RISC User cd (that was version 5.005) and even downloaded
Alex Waugh's version 5.8.0. But I did not much with it until yesterday.

Then I wanted to set things up so that I would be able to really do Perl
programming under RISC OS, but failed. After a full day of trying I feel
that it will take ages before I shall have figured out myself how Perl has
to be set up.

In essence, Perl works, that is, some scripts do run, but there are two big
problems.

1. I see no way to make the Risc PC gracefully handle running Perl scripts:
   - by double clicking a script file in the desktop (how to pass parameters
     then if needed?);
   - in a task window;
   - from the bare command line.
   I found !PerlRun which seems designed to solve this problem, but if I use
   that I invariably get a 'No writable memory at this address' message.

2. Perl cannot find the packages that many, many scripts rely on
   Perl very often reports that it cannot find a certain package in a list
   of directories in @INC (yes I know what that is for) that in no way
   corresponds to the directory structure within !Perl. I cannot believe
   that I am supposed to rearrange all the packages into directories
     /home/riscos/cross/local/lib/perl5/5.8.0/riscos-aof
     /home/riscos/cross/local/lib/perl5/5.8.0
     /home/riscos/cross/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/riscos-aof
     /home/riscos/cross/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0
     /home/riscos/cross/local/lib/perl5/site_perl
   It is equally hard to believe that I am supposed to edit the start of
   each and every supplied script to make it change @INC at compile time;
   apart from that, attempts to do it failed. Is there a way to do it
   globally?

Please, can someone enlighten me on how to solve these problems, so that I
can *conveniently* use RISC OS Perl? I probably need some pretty detailed
instructions on what files to put where and what startup scripts to tweak.
And of course, if someone is able and willing to write such instructions,
publish them on the internet and make RISC OS Ltd add them to their next
Foundation User cd.

Many thanks in advance and kind regards,
Ben Kal

-- 

B.F.M. Kal
Anjelierstraat 1,   2014 TC Haarlem,  Netherlands
tel +31 23 5324909, benkal@euronet.nl

• how to set up !Perl by Ben Kal
• Re: how to set up !Perl by Alex Waugh
• Re: how to set up !Perl by Ben Kal
• Re: how to set up !Perl by James Taylor
• Re: how to set up !Perl by Ben Kal