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Postings from September 2002
At 8:36 AM +0800 9/12/02, Mark Stray wrote:
>I notice a few e-mails from you regards Perl on OpenVMS.
Too true. If others would post to the list more often I'd be happy
to post less often ;-).
>Could you please point me in the right direction to getting the latest (or
>one with less bugs) version of Perl.
>
>I am running OpenVMS 7.2-1h1.
The easiest way to get Perl is to use the PCSI kit created by OpenVMS
Engineering and available at:
<http://www.openvms.compaq.com/openvms/products/ips/apache/csws_modperl.html>
They officially support that for folks who have VMS support contracts.
Currently they are still at 5.6.1.
The next easiest way to get 5.6.1 is to get my easy-to-build kit from
<http://www.sidhe.org/vmsperl>. That also includes a bunch of
extensions and a command procedure that will build the whole shebang
with one submit command.
The canonical location of 5.6.1 is currently
<http://www.cpan.org/src/stable.tar.gz>
The canonical location of the latest version of the Perl source is always
<http://www.cpan.org/src/latest.tar.gz>
The latest is currently 5.8.0. Sometimes "stable" and "latest" are
the same thing, but so much changed in 5.8.0 that they've apparently
decided to keep them distinct for now. Whether you choose the latest
or not is up to you. There are known bugs in 5.6.1 that are fixed in
5.8.0, but 5.8.0 hasn't been around very long and hasn't been tested
as much. 5.8.0 is known to have extension building broken on VMS,
though there is a patch for that (search the archives of this list).
For your VMS version (7.2-1H1) there is also some confusion about
what C RTL version has the internal __vms_waitpid function and this
could potentially cause you a compile failure with 5.8.0.
I hope that's not too confusing. Whatever you decide to do, feel
free to post to vmsperl for help with any snags you encounter.
--
________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:craigberry@mac.com
"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
difficult than getting in."
Brad Leithauser