Index Index for
Section 1
Index Alphabetical
listing for P
Bottom of page Bottom of
page		 

PERLMACHTEN(1)


NAME

  README.machten - Perl version 5 on Power MachTen systems


DESCRIPTION

  This document describes how to build Perl 5 on Power MachTen systems, and
  discusses a few wrinkles in the implementation.

  Perl version 5.8.x and greater not supported

  Power MachTen is not supported by versions of Perl later than 5.6.x. If you
  wish to build a version from the 5.6 track, please obtain a source
  distribution from the archive at <http://cpan.org/src/5.0/> and follow the
  instructions in its README.machten file.

  MachTen is no longer supported by its developers, Tenon Intersystems.	 A
  UNIX environment hosted on Mac OS Classic, MachTen has been superseded by
  Mac OS X and by BSD and Linux implementations for Macintosh hardware.	 The
  final version of Power MachTen, 4.1.4, lacks many features found in modern
  implementations of UNIX, and has a number of bugs.  These shortcomings
  prevent recent versions of Perl from being able to use extensions on
  MachTen, and cause numerous test suite failures in the perl core.

  In September 2003, a discussion on the MachTen mailing list determined that
  there was no interest in making a later version of Perl build successfully
  on MachTen.  Consequently, support for building Perl under MachTen has been
  suppressed in Perl distributions published after February 2004.  The hints
  file, hints/machten.sh, remains a part of the distributions for reference
  purposes.

  Compiling Perl 5.6.x on MachTen

  To compile perl 5.6.x under MachTen 4.1.4 (and probably earlier versions):

    ./Configure -de
    make
    make test
    make install

  This builds and installs a statically-linked perl; MachTen's dynamic
  linking facilities are not adequate to support Perl's use of dynamically
  linked libraries.  (See hints/machten.sh for more information.)

  You should have at least 32 megabytes of free memory on your system before
  running the "make" command.

  For much more information on building perl -- for example, on how to change
  the default installation directory -- see INSTALL.

  Failures during "make test" on MachTen

  op/lexassign.t
      This test may fail when first run after building perl.  It does not
      fail subsequently.  The cause is unknown.

  pragma/warnings.t
      Test 257 fails due to a failure to warn about attempts to read from a
      filehandle which is a duplicate of stdout when stdout is attached to a
      pipe.  The output of the test contains a block comment which discusses
      a different failure, not applicable to MachTen.

      The root of the problem is that Machten does not assign a file type to
      either end of a pipe (see stat), resulting, among other things in
      Perl's "-p" test failing on file descriptors belonging to pipes.	As a
      result, perl becomes confused, and the test for reading from a write-
      only file fails.	I am reluctant to patch perl to get around this, as
      it's clearly an OS bug (about which Tenon has been informed), and
      limited in its effect on practical Perl programs.

  Building external modules on MachTen

  To add an external module to perl, build in the normal way, which is
  documented in ExtUtils::MakeMaker, or which can be driven automatically by
  the CPAN module (see CPAN), which is part of the standard distribution.  If
  you want to install a module which contains XS code (C or C++ source which
  compiles to object code for linking with perl), you will have to replace
  your perl binary with a new version containing the new statically-linked
  object module.  The build process tells you how to do this.

  There is a gotcha, however, which users usually encounter immediately they
  respond to CPAN's invitation to "install Bundle::CPAN". When installing a
  bundle -- a group of modules which together achieve some particular
  purpose, the installation process for later modules in the bundle tends to
  assume that earlier modules have been fully installed and are available for
  use.	This is not true on a statically-linked system for earlier modules
  which contain XS code.  As a result the installation of the bundle fails.
  The work-around is not to install the bundle as a one-shot operation, but
  instead to see what modules it contains, and install these one-at-a-time by
  hand in the order given.


AUTHOR

  Dominic Dunlop <domo@computer.org>


DATE

  Version 1.1.0 2004-02-13

Index Index for
Section 1
Index Alphabetical
listing for P
Top of page Top of
page