PERLVMESA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLVMESA(1)NAME
README.vmesa - building and installing Perl for VM/ESA.
SYNOPSIS
This document will help you Configure, build, test and
install Perl on VM/ESA.
DESCRIPTION
This is a fully ported perl for VM/ESA 2.3.0. It may work
on other versions, but that's the one we've tested it on.
If you've downloaded the binary distribution, it needs to
be installed below /usr/local. Source code distributions
have an automated `make install` step that means you do
not need to extract the source code below /usr/local
(though that is where it will be installed by default).
You may need to worry about the networking configuration
files discussed in the last bullet below.
Unpacking
To extract an ASCII tar archive on VM/ESA, try this:
pax -o to=IBM-1047,from=ISO8859-1 -r < latest.tar
Setup and utilities
GNU make for VM/ESA, which may be required for the build
of perl, is available from:
http://pucc.princeton.edu/~neale/vmoe.html
Configure
Once you've unpacked the distribution, run Configure (see
INSTALL for full discussion of the Configure options), and
then run make, then "make test" then "make install" (this
last step may require UID=0 privileges).
There is a "hints" file for vmesa that specifies the cor
rect values for most things. Some things to watch out for
are:
this port does support dynamic loading but it's not
had much testing
Don't turn on the compiler optimization flag "-O".
There's a bug in the compiler (APAR PQ18812) that gen
erates some bad code the optimizer is on.
As VM/ESA doesn't fully support the fork() API pro
grams relying on this call will not work. I've
replaced fork()/exec() with spawn() and the standalone
exec() with spawn(). This has a side effect when open
ing unnamed pipes in a shell script: there is no child
process generated under.
At the moment the hints file for VM/ESA basically
bypasses all of the automatic configuration process.
This is because Configure relies on: 1. The header
files living in the Byte File System (you could put
the there if you want); 2. The C preprocessor includ
ing the #include statements in the preprocessor output
(.i) file.
testing anomalies
The `make test` step runs a Perl Verification Procedure,
usually before installation. As the 5.6.1 kit was was
being assembled the following "failures" were known to
appear on some machines during `make test` (mostly due to
ASCII vs. EBCDIC conflicts), your results may differ:
[the list of failures being compiled]
Usage Hints
When using perl on VM/ESA please keep in mind that the
EBCDIC and ASCII character sets are different. Perl
builtin functions that may behave differently under EBCDIC
are mentioned in the perlport.pod document.
OpenEdition (UNIX System Services) does not (yet) support
the #! means of script invocation. See:
head `whence perldoc`
for an example of how to use the "eval exec" trick to ask
the shell to have perl run your scripts for you.
AUTHORS
Neale Ferguson.
SEE ALSO
the INSTALL manpage, the perlport manpage, the perlebcdic
manpage.
Mailing list
If you are interested in the VM and OS/390 ports of perl
then see the perl-mvs mailing list: The Perl Institute
(http://www.perl.org/) maintains a mailing list of inter
est to all folks building and/or using perl on EBCDIC
platforms. To subscribe, send a message of:
subscribe perl-mvs
to majordomo@perl.org.
See also:
http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=perl-mvs
There are web archives of the mailing list at:
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl-mvs/
http://archive.develooper.com/perl-mvs@perl.org/
2001-03-03 perl v5.6.1 PERLVMESA(1)
