If you read this file _as_is_, just ignore the funny characters you
see. It is written in the POD format (see perlpod manpage) which is
specially designed to be readable as is.
=head1 NAME
perlos2 - Perl under OS/2, DOS, Win0.3*, Win0.95 and WinNT.
=head1 SYNOPSIS
One can read this document in the following formats:
man perlos2
view perl perlos2
explorer perlos2.html
info perlos2
to list some (not all may be available simultaneously), or it may
be read I: either as F, or F.
To read the F<.INF> version of documentation (B recommended)
outside of OS/2, one needs an IBM's reader (may be available on IBM
ftp sites (?) (URL anyone?)) or shipped with PC DOS 7.0 and IBM's
Visual Age C++ 3.5.
A copy of a Win* viewer is contained in the "Just add OS/2 Warp" package
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/ps/products/os2/tools/jaow/jaow.zip
in F. This gives one an access to EMX's
F<.INF> docs as well (text form is available in F in
EMX's distribution). There is also a different viewer named xview.
Note that if you have F or F installed, you can follow WWW links
from this document in F<.INF> format. If you have EMX docs installed
correctly, you can follow library links (you need to have C
working by setting C environment variable as it is described
in EMX docs).
=cut
Contents (This may be a little bit obsolete)
perlos2 - Perl under OS/2, DOS, Win0.3*, Win0.95 and WinNT.
NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
- Target
- Other OSes
- Prerequisites
- Starting Perl programs under OS/2 (and DOS and...)
- Starting OS/2 (and DOS) programs under Perl
Frequently asked questions
- "It does not work"
- I cannot run external programs
- I cannot embed perl into my program, or use perl.dll from my
- `` and pipe-open do not work under DOS.
- Cannot start find.exe "pattern" file
INSTALLATION
- Automatic binary installation
- Manual binary installation
- Warning
Accessing documentation
- OS/2 .INF file
- Plain text
- Manpages
- HTML
- GNU info files
- PDF files
- LaTeX docs
BUILD
- The short story
- Prerequisites
- Getting perl source
- Application of the patches
- Hand-editing
- Making
- Testing
- Installing the built perl
- a.out-style build
Build FAQ
- Some / became \ in pdksh.
- 'errno' - unresolved external
- Problems with tr or sed
- Some problem (forget which ;-)
- Library ... not found
- Segfault in make
- op/sprintf test failure
Specific (mis)features of OS/2 port
- setpriority, getpriority
- system()
- extproc on the first line
- Additional modules:
- Prebuilt methods:
- Prebuilt variables:
- Misfeatures
- Modifications
- Identifying DLLs
- Centralized management of resources
Perl flavors
- perl.exe
- perl_.exe
- perl__.exe
- perl___.exe
- Why strange names?
- Why dynamic linking?
- Why chimera build?
ENVIRONMENT
- PERLLIB_PREFIX
- PERL_BADLANG
- PERL_BADFREE
- PERL_SH_DIR
- USE_PERL_FLOCK
- TMP or TEMP
Evolution
- Text-mode filehandles
- Priorities
- DLL name mangling: pre 5.6.2
- DLL name mangling: 5.6.2 and beyond
- DLL forwarder generation
- Threading
- Calls to external programs
- Memory allocation
- Threads
BUGS
AUTHOR
SEE ALSO
=head1 DESCRIPTION
=head2 Target
The target is to make OS/2 one of the best supported platform for
using/building/developing Perl and I, as well as
make Perl the best language to use under OS/2. The secondary target is
to try to make this work under DOS and Win* as well (but not B hard).
The current state is quite close to this target. Known limitations:
=over 5
=item *
Some *nix programs use fork() a lot; with the mostly useful flavors of
perl for OS/2 (there are several built simultaneously) this is
supported; but some flavors do not support this (e.g., when Perl is
called from inside REXX). Using fork() after
Iing dynamically loading extensions would not work with I old
versions of EMX.
=item *
You need a separate perl executable F (see L)
if you want to use PM code in your application (as Perl/Tk or OpenGL
Perl modules do) without having a text-mode window present.
While using the standard F from a text-mode window is possible
too, I have seen cases when this causes degradation of the system stability.
Using F avoids such a degradation.
=item *
There is no simple way to access WPS objects. The only way I know
is via C and C extensions (see L, L).
However, we do not have access to
convenience methods of Object-REXX. (Is it possible at all? I know
of no Object-REXX API.) The C extension (currently in alpha-text)
may eventually remove this shortcoming; however, due to the fact that
DII is not supported by the C module, using C is not as
convenient as one would like it.
=back
Please keep this list up-to-date by informing me about other items.
=head2 Other OSes
Since OS/2 port of perl uses a remarkable EMX environment, it can
run (and build extensions, and - possibly - be built itself) under any
environment which can run EMX. The current list is DOS,
DOS-inside-OS/2, Win0.3*, Win0.95 and WinNT. Out of many perl flavors,
only one works, see L<"perl_.exe">.
Note that not all features of Perl are available under these
environments. This depends on the features the I - most
probably RSX - decided to implement.
Cf. L.
=head2 Prerequisites
=over 6
=item EMX
EMX runtime is required (may be substituted by RSX). Note that
it is possible to make F to run under DOS without any
external support by binding F/F to it, see L. Note
that under DOS for best results one should use RSX runtime, which
has much more functions working (like C, C and so on). In
fact RSX is required if there is no VCPI present. Note the
RSX requires DPMI. Many implementations of DPMI are known to be very
buggy, beware!
Only the latest runtime is supported, currently C<0.9d fix 03>. Perl may run
under earlier versions of EMX, but this is not tested.
One can get different parts of EMX from, say
http://www.leo.org/pub/comp/os/os2/leo/gnu/emx+gcc/
http://powerusersbbs.com/pub/os2/dev/ [EMX+GCC Development]
http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/dev/emx/v0.9d/
The runtime component should have the name F.
B. When using F/F, it is enough to have them on your path. One
does not need to specify them explicitly (though this
emx perl_.exe -de 0
will work as well.)
=item RSX
To run Perl on DPMI platforms one needs RSX runtime. This is
needed under DOS-inside-OS/2, Win0.3*, Win0.95 and WinNT (see
L<"Other OSes">). RSX would not work with VCPI
only, as EMX would, it requires DMPI.
Having RSX and the latest F one gets a fully functional
B<*nix>-ish environment under DOS, say, C, C<``> and
pipe-C work. In fact, MakeMaker works (for static build), so one
can have Perl development environment under DOS.
One can get RSX from, say
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/os2/emx09c/contrib
ftp://ftp.uni-bielefeld.de/pub/systems/msdos/misc
ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/comp/os/os2/leo/devtools/emx+gcc/contrib
Contact the author on C.
The latest F with DOS hooks is available in
http://www.ilyaz.org/software/os2/
as F or under similar names starting with C, C etc.
=item HPFS
Perl does not care about file systems, but the perl library contains
many files with long names, so to install it intact one needs a file
system which supports long file names.
Note that if you do not plan to build the perl itself, it may be
possible to fool EMX to truncate file names. This is not supported,
read EMX docs to see how to do it.
=item pdksh
To start external programs with complicated command lines (like with
pipes in between, and/or quoting of arguments), Perl uses an external
shell. With EMX port such shell should be named F, and located
either in the wired-in-during-compile locations (usually F),
or in configurable location (see L<"PERL_SH_DIR">).
For best results use EMX pdksh. The standard binary (5.2.14 or later) runs
under DOS (with L) as well, see
http://www.ilyaz.org/software/os2/
=back
=head2 Starting Perl programs under OS/2 (and DOS and...)
Start your Perl program F with arguments C the
same way as on any other platform, by
perl foo.pl arg1 arg2 arg3
If you want to specify perl options C<-my_opts> to the perl itself (as
opposed to your program), use
perl -my_opts foo.pl arg1 arg2 arg3
Alternately, if you use OS/2-ish shell, like CMD or 4os2, put
the following at the start of your perl script:
extproc perl -S -my_opts
rename your program to F, and start it by typing
foo arg1 arg2 arg3
Note that because of stupid OS/2 limitations the full path of the perl
script is not available when you use C, thus you are forced to
use C<-S> perl switch, and your script should be on the C. As a plus
side, if you know a full path to your script, you may still start it
with
perl ../../blah/foo.cmd arg1 arg2 arg3
(note that the argument C<-my_opts> is taken care of by the C line
in your script, see L on the first line>).
To understand what the above I does, read perl docs about C<-S>
switch - see L, and cmdref about C:
view perl perlrun
man perlrun
view cmdref extproc
help extproc
or whatever method you prefer.
There are also endless possibilities to use I of
4os2, I of WPS and so on... However, if you use
*nixish shell (like F supplied in the binary distribution),
you need to follow the syntax specified in L.
Note that B<-S> switch supports scripts with additional extensions
F<.cmd>, F<.btm>, F<.bat>, F<.pl> as well.
=head2 Starting OS/2 (and DOS) programs under Perl
This is what system() (see L), C<``> (see
L), and I (see L)
are for. (Avoid exec() (see L) unless you know what you
do).
Note however that to use some of these operators you need to have a
sh-syntax shell installed (see L<"Pdksh">,
L<"Frequently asked questions">), and perl should be able to find it
(see L<"PERL_SH_DIR">).
The cases when the shell is used are:
=over
=item 1
One-argument system() (see L), exec() (see L)
with redirection or shell meta-characters;
=item 2
Pipe-open (see L) with the command which contains redirection
or shell meta-characters;
=item 3
Backticks C<``> (see L) with the command which contains
redirection or shell meta-characters;
=item 4
If the executable called by system()/exec()/pipe-open()/C<``> is a script
with the "magic" C<#!> line or C line which specifies shell;
=item 5
If the executable called by system()/exec()/pipe-open()/C<``> is a script
without "magic" line, and C<$ENV{EXECSHELL}> is set to shell;
=item 6
If the executable called by system()/exec()/pipe-open()/C<``> is not
found (is not this remark obsolete?);
=item 7
For globbing (see L, L)
(obsolete? Perl uses builtin globbing nowadays...).
=back
For the sake of speed for a common case, in the above algorithms
backslashes in the command name are not considered as shell metacharacters.
Perl starts scripts which begin with cookies
C or C<#!> directly, without an intervention of shell. Perl uses the
same algorithm to find the executable as F: if the path
on C<#!> line does not work, and contains C, then the directory
part of the executable is ignored, and the executable
is searched in F<.> and on C. To find arguments for these scripts
Perl uses a different algorithm than F: up to 3 arguments are
recognized, and trailing whitespace is stripped.
If a script
does not contain such a cooky, then to avoid calling F, Perl uses
the same algorithm as F: if C<$ENV{EXECSHELL}> is set, the
script is given as the first argument to this command, if not set, then
C<$ENV{COMSPEC} /c> is used (or a hardwired guess if C<$ENV{COMSPEC}> is
not set).
When starting scripts directly, Perl uses exactly the same algorithm as for
the search of script given by B<-S> command-line option: it will look in
the current directory, then on components of C<$ENV{PATH}> using the
following order of appended extensions: no extension, F<.cmd>, F<.btm>,
F<.bat>, F<.pl>.
Note that Perl will start to look for scripts only if OS/2 cannot start the
specified application, thus C will not look for a script if
there is an executable file F I on C. In
other words, C is essentially searched twice: once by the OS for
an executable, then by Perl for scripts.
Note also that executable files on OS/2 can have an arbitrary extension,
but F<.exe> will be automatically appended if no dot is present in the name.
The workaround is as simple as that: since F and F denote the
same file (at list on FAT and HPFS file systems), to start an executable residing in file F (no
extension) give an argument C (dot appended) to system().
Perl will start PM programs from VIO (=text-mode) Perl process in a
separate PM session;
the opposite is not true: when you start a non-PM program from a PM
Perl process, Perl would not run it in a separate session. If a separate
session is desired, either ensure
that shell will be used, as in C, or start it using
optional arguments to system() documented in C module. This
is considered to be a feature.
=head1 Frequently asked questions
=head2 "It does not work"
Perl binary distributions come with a F script which tries
to detect common problems with misconfigured installations. There is a
pretty large chance it will discover which step of the installation you
managed to goof. C<;-)>
=head2 I cannot run external programs
=over 4
=item *
Did you run your programs with C<-w> switch? See
L.
=item *
Do you try to run I shell commands, like C<`copy a b`>
(internal for F), or C<`glob a*b`> (internal for ksh)? You
need to specify your shell explicitly, like C<`cmd /c copy a b`>,
since Perl cannot deduce which commands are internal to your shell.
=back
=head2 I cannot embed perl into my program, or use F from my
program.
=over 4
=item Is your program EMX-compiled with C<-Zmt -Zcrtdll>?
Well, nowadays Perl DLL should be usable from a differently compiled
program too... If you can run Perl code from REXX scripts (see
L), then there are some other aspect of interaction which
are overlooked by the current hackish code to support
differently-compiled principal programs.
If everything else fails, you need to build a stand-alone DLL for
perl. Contact me, I did it once. Sockets would not work, as a lot of
other stuff.
=item Did you use L?
Some time ago I had reports it does not work. Nowadays it is checked
in the Perl test suite, so grep F<./t> subdirectory of the build tree
(as well as F<*.t> files in the F<./lib> subdirectory) to find how it
should be done "correctly".
=back
=head2 C<``> and pipe-C do not work under DOS.
This may a variant of just L<"I cannot run external programs">, or a
deeper problem. Basically: you I RSX (see L<"Prerequisites">)
for these commands to work, and you may need a port of F which
understands command arguments. One of such ports is listed in
L<"Prerequisites"> under RSX. Do not forget to set variable
C> as well.
DPMI is required for RSX.
=head2 Cannot start C
The whole idea of the "standard C API to start applications" is that
the forms C and C<"foo"> of program arguments are completely
interchangable. F breaks this paradigm;
find "pattern" file
find pattern file
are not equivalent; F cannot be started directly using the above
API. One needs a way to surround the doublequotes in some other
quoting construction, necessarily having an extra non-Unixish shell in
between.
Use one of
system 'cmd', '/c', 'find "pattern" file';
`cmd /c 'find "pattern" file'`
This would start F via F via C via
C, but this is a price to pay if you want to use
non-conforming program.
=head1 INSTALLATION
=head2 Automatic binary installation
The most convenient way of installing a binary distribution of perl is via perl installer
F. Just follow the instructions, and 99% of the
installation blues would go away.
Note however, that you need to have F on your path, and
EMX environment I. The latter means that if you just
installed EMX, and made all the needed changes to F,
you may need to reboot in between. Check EMX runtime by running
emxrev
Binary installer also creates a folder on your desktop with some useful
objects. If you need to change some aspects of the work of the binary
installer, feel free to edit the file F. This may be useful
e.g., if you need to run the installer many times and do not want to
make many interactive changes in the GUI.
B
=over 15
=item C
may be needed if you change your codepage I perl installation,
and the new value is not supported by EMX. See L<"PERL_BADLANG">.
=item C
see L<"PERL_BADFREE">.
=item F
This file resides somewhere deep in the location you installed your
perl library, find it out by
perl -MConfig -le "print $INC{'Config.pm'}"
While most important values in this file I updated by the binary
installer, some of them may need to be hand-edited. I know no such
data, please keep me informed if you find one. Moreover, manual
changes to the installed version may need to be accompanied by an edit
of this file.
=back
B. Because of a typo the binary installer of 5.00305
would install a variable C into F. Please
remove this variable and put C> instead.
=head2 Manual binary installation
As of version 5.00305, OS/2 perl binary distribution comes split
into 11 components. Unfortunately, to enable configurable binary
installation, the file paths in the zip files are not absolute, but
relative to some directory.
Note that the extraction with the stored paths is still necessary
(default with unzip, specify C<-d> to pkunzip). However, you
need to know where to extract the files. You need also to manually
change entries in F to reflect where did you put the
files. Note that if you have some primitive unzipper (like
C), you may get a lot of warnings/errors during
unzipping. Upgrade to C<(w)unzip>.
Below is the sample of what to do to reproduce the configuration on my
machine. In F you can press C now, and
cut-and-paste from the resulting file - created in the directory you
started F from.
For each component, we mention environment variables related to each
installation directory. Either choose directories to match your
values of the variables, or create/append-to variables to take into
account the directories.
=over 3
=item Perl VIO and PM executables (dynamically linked)
unzip perl_exc.zip *.exe *.ico -d f:/emx.add/bin
unzip perl_exc.zip *.dll -d f:/emx.add/dll
(have the directories with C<*.exe> on PATH, and C<*.dll> on
LIBPATH);
=item Perl_ VIO executable (statically linked)
unzip perl_aou.zip -d f:/emx.add/bin
(have the directory on PATH);
=item Executables for Perl utilities
unzip perl_utl.zip -d f:/emx.add/bin
(have the directory on PATH);
=item Main Perl library
unzip perl_mlb.zip -d f:/perllib/lib
If this directory is exactly the same as the prefix which was compiled
into F, you do not need to change
anything. However, for perl to find the library if you use a different
path, you need to
C in F, see L<"PERLLIB_PREFIX">.
=item Additional Perl modules
unzip perl_ste.zip -d f:/perllib/lib/site_perl/5.10.1/
Same remark as above applies. Additionally, if this directory is not
one of directories on @INC (and @INC is influenced by C), you
need to put this
directory and subdirectory F<./os2> in C or C
variable. Do not use C unless you have it set already. See
L.
B<[Check whether this extraction directory is still applicable with
the new directory structure layout!]>
=item Tools to compile Perl modules
unzip perl_blb.zip -d f:/perllib/lib
Same remark as for F.
=item Manpages for Perl and utilities
unzip perl_man.zip -d f:/perllib/man
This directory should better be on C. You need to have a
working F to access these files.
=item Manpages for Perl modules
unzip perl_mam.zip -d f:/perllib/man
This directory should better be on C. You need to have a
working man to access these files.
=item Source for Perl documentation
unzip perl_pod.zip -d f:/perllib/lib
This is used by the C program (see L), and may be used to
generate HTML documentation usable by WWW browsers, and
documentation in zillions of other formats: C, C,
C, C and so on. [Use programs such as
F etc.]
=item Perl manual in F<.INF> format
unzip perl_inf.zip -d d:/os2/book
This directory should better be on C.
=item Pdksh
unzip perl_sh.zip -d f:/bin
This is used by perl to run external commands which explicitly
require shell, like the commands using I and I. It is also used instead of explicit F.
Set C (see L<"PERL_SH_DIR">) if you move F from
the above location.
B It may be possible to use some other sh-compatible shell (untested).
=back
After you installed the components you needed and updated the
F correspondingly, you need to hand-edit
F. This file resides somewhere deep in the location you
installed your perl library, find it out by
perl -MConfig -le "print $INC{'Config.pm'}"
You need to correct all the entries which look like file paths (they
currently start with C
The automatic and manual perl installation leave precompiled paths
inside perl executables. While these paths are overwriteable (see
L<"PERLLIB_PREFIX">, L<"PERL_SH_DIR">), some people may prefer
binary editing of paths inside the executables/DLLs.
=head1 Accessing documentation
Depending on how you built/installed perl you may have (otherwise
identical) Perl documentation in the following formats:
=head2 OS/2 F<.INF> file
Most probably the most convenient form. Under OS/2 view it as
view perl
view perl perlfunc
view perl less
view perl ExtUtils::MakeMaker
(currently the last two may hit a wrong location, but this may improve
soon). Under Win* see L<"SYNOPSIS">.
If you want to build the docs yourself, and have I, run
pod2ipf > perl.ipf
in F directory, then
ipfc /inf perl.ipf
(Expect a lot of errors during the both steps.) Now move it on your
BOOKSHELF path.
=head2 Plain text
If you have perl documentation in the source form, perl utilities
installed, and GNU groff installed, you may use
perldoc perlfunc
perldoc less
perldoc ExtUtils::MakeMaker
to access the perl documentation in the text form (note that you may get
better results using perl manpages).
Alternately, try running pod2text on F<.pod> files.
=head2 Manpages
If you have F installed on your system, and you installed perl
manpages, use something like this:
man perlfunc
man 3 less
man ExtUtils.MakeMaker
to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with
man perl
Note that dot (F<.>) is used as a package separator for documentation
for packages, and as usual, sometimes you need to give the section - C<3>
above - to avoid shadowing by the I.
Make sure that the directory B the directory with manpages is
on our C, like this
set MANPATH=c:/man;f:/perllib/man
for Perl manpages in C in this
directory, and go ahead with reading docs, like this:
explore file:///f:/perllib/lib/pod/perl.html
Alternatively you may be able to get these docs prebuilt from CPAN.
=head2 GNU C files
Users of Emacs would appreciate it very much, especially with
C mode loaded. You need to get latest C from C,
or, alternately, the prebuilt info pages.
=head2 F files
for C are available on CPAN (may be for slightly older version of
perl).
=head2 C docs
can be constructed using C.
=head1 BUILD
Here we discuss how to build Perl under OS/2. There is an alternative
(but maybe older) view on L.
=head2 The short story
Assume that you are a seasoned porter, so are sure that all the necessary
tools are already present on your system, and you know how to get the Perl
source distribution. Untar it, change to the extract directory, and
gnupatch -p0 < os2\diff.configure
sh Configure -des -D prefix=f:/perllib
make
make test
make install
make aout_test
make aout_install
This puts the executables in f:/perllib/bin. Manually move them to the
C, manually move the built F to C (here for
Perl DLL F<*> is a not-very-meaningful hex checksum), and run
make installcmd INSTALLCMDDIR=d:/ir/on/path
Assuming that the C-files were put on an appropriate location,
this completes the installation of minimal Perl system. (The binary
distribution contains also a lot of additional modules, and the
documentation in INF format.)
What follows is a detailed guide through these steps.
=head2 Prerequisites
You need to have the latest EMX development environment, the full
GNU tool suite (gawk renamed to awk, and GNU F
earlier on path than the OS/2 F, same with F, to
check use
find --version
sort --version
). You need the latest version of F installed as F.
Check that you have B libraries and headers installed, and -
optionally - Berkeley DB headers and libraries, and crypt.
Possible locations to get the files:
ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/unix/
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/os2/unix/
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/os2/dev32/
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/os2/emx09c/
It is reported that the following archives contain enough utils to
build perl: F, F, F, F,
F, F, F, F, F and
F (or a later version). Note that all these utilities are
known to be available from LEO:
ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/comp/os/os2/leo/gnu
Note also that the F and F from the EMX distribution
are not suitable for multi-threaded compile (even single-threaded
flavor of Perl uses multi-threaded C RTL, for
compatibility with XFree86-OS/2). Get a corrected one from
http://www.ilyaz.org/software/os2/db_mt.zip
If you have I installed already,
make sure that no copies or perl are currently running. Later steps
of the build may fail since an older version of F loaded into
memory may be found. Running C becomes meaningless, since
the test are checking a previous build of perl (this situation is detected
and reported by F test). Do not forget to unset
C in environment.
Also make sure that you have F directory on the current drive,
and F<.> directory in your C. One may try to correct the
latter condition by
set BEGINLIBPATH .\.
if you use something like F or latest versions of
F<4os2.exe>. (Setting BEGINLIBPATH to just C<.> is ignored by the
OS/2 kernel.)
Make sure your gcc is good for C<-Zomf> linking: run C
script in F directory.
Check that you have link386 installed. It comes standard with OS/2,
but may be not installed due to customization. If typing
link386
shows you do not have it, do I, and choose C. If you get into
link386 prompts, press C to exit.
=head2 Getting perl source
You need to fetch the latest perl source (including developers
releases). With some probability it is located in
http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0
http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/unsupported
If not, you may need to dig in the indices to find it in the directory
of the current maintainer.
Quick cycle of developers release may break the OS/2 build time to
time, looking into
http://www.cpan.org/ports/os2/
may indicate the latest release which was publicly released by the
maintainer. Note that the release may include some additional patches
to apply to the current source of perl.
Extract it like this
tar vzxf perl5.00409.tar.gz
You may see a message about errors while extracting F. This is
because there is a conflict with a similarly-named file F.
Change to the directory of extraction.
=head2 Application of the patches
You need to apply the patches in F<./os2/diff.*> like this:
gnupatch -p0 < os2\diff.configure
You may also need to apply the patches supplied with the binary
distribution of perl. It also makes sense to look on the
perl5-porters mailing list for the latest OS/2-related patches (see
L, so it makes
sense looking for these strings.
=head2 Hand-editing
You may look into the file F<./hints/os2.sh> and correct anything
wrong you find there. I do not expect it is needed anywhere.
=head2 Making
sh Configure -des -D prefix=f:/perllib
C means: where to install the resulting perl library. Giving
correct prefix you may avoid the need to specify C,
see L<"PERLLIB_PREFIX">.
I, and about C<-c> option to
tr>. The latter is most probably already fixed, if you see it and can trace
where the latter spurious warning comes from, please inform me.
Now
make
At some moment the built may die, reporting a I or
I>. This means that you do not have F<.> in
your LIBPATH, so F cannot find the needed F (treat
these hex digits as line noise). After this is fixed the build
should finish without a lot of fuss.
=head2 Testing
Now run
make test
All tests should succeed (with some of them skipped). If you have the
same version of Perl installed, it is crucial that you have C<.> early
in your LIBPATH (or in BEGINLIBPATH), otherwise your tests will most
probably test the wrong version of Perl.
Some tests may generate extra messages similar to
=over 4
=item A lot of C
in database tests related to Berkeley DB. I
If it persists, you may disable this warnings, see L<"PERL_BADFREE">.
=item Process terminated by SIGTERM/SIGINT
This is a standard message issued by OS/2 applications. *nix
applications die in silence. It is considered to be a feature. One can
easily disable this by appropriate sighandlers.
However the test engine bleeds these message to screen in unexpected
moments. Two messages of this kind I be present during
testing.
=back
To get finer test reports, call
perl t/harness
The report with F failing may look like this:
Failed Test Status Wstat Total Fail Failed List of failed
------------------------------------------------------------
io/pipe.t 12 1 8.33% 9
7 tests skipped, plus 56 subtests skipped.
Failed 1/195 test scripts, 99.49% okay. 1/6542 subtests failed, 99.98% okay.
The reasons for most important skipped tests are:
=over 8
=item F
=over 4
=item 18
Checks C and C of C - unfortunately, HPFS
provides only 2sec time granularity (for compatibility with FAT?).
=item 25
Checks C on a filehandle just opened for write - I do not
know why this should or should not work.
=back
=item F
Checks C. Tests:
=over 4
=item 4
Checks C and C of C - unfortunately, HPFS
provides only 2sec time granularity (for compatibility with FAT?).
=back
=back
=head2 Installing the built perl
If you haven't yet moved C onto LIBPATH, do it now.
Run
make install
It would put the generated files into needed locations. Manually put
F, F and F to a location on your
PATH, F to a location on your LIBPATH.
Run
make installcmd INSTALLCMDDIR=d:/ir/on/path
to convert perl utilities to F<.cmd> files and put them on
PATH. You need to put F<.EXE>-utilities on path manually. They are
installed in C<$prefix/bin>, here C<$prefix> is what you gave to
F, see L.
If you use C, either move the installed F<*/man/> directories to
your C, or modify C to match the location. (One
could have avoided this by providing a correct C option to
F<./Configure>, or editing F<./config.sh> between configuring and
making steps.)
=head2 C-style build
Proceed as above, but make F (see L<"perl_.exe">) by
make perl_
test and install by
make aout_test
make aout_install
Manually put F to a location on your PATH.
B The build process for C I about all the
dependencies, so you should make sure that anything is up-to-date,
say, by doing
make perl_dll
first.
=head1 Building a binary distribution
[This section provides a short overview only...]
Building should proceed differently depending on whether the version of perl
you install is already present and used on your system, or is a new version
not yet used. The description below assumes that the version is new, so
installing its DLLs and F<.pm> files will not disrupt the operation of your
system even if some intermediate steps are not yet fully working.
The other cases require a little bit more convoluted procedures. Below I
suppose that the current version of Perl is C<5.8.2>, so the executables are
named accordingly.
=over
=item 1.
Fully build and test the Perl distribution. Make sure that no tests are
failing with C and C targets; fix the bugs in Perl and
the Perl test suite detected by these tests. Make sure that C
make target runs as clean as possible. Check that C
runs fine.
=item 2.
Fully install Perl, including C target. Copy the generated DLLs
to C; copy the numbered Perl executables (as in F)
to C; copy C to C as C. Think whether
you need backward-compatibility DLLs. In most cases you do not need to install
them yet; but sometime this may simplify the following steps.
=item 3.
Make sure that C can download files from CPAN. If not, you may need
to manually install C.
=item 4.
Install the bundle C
perl5.8.2 -MCPAN -e "install Bundle::OS2_default" < nul |& tee 00cpan_i_1
This may take a couple of hours on 1GHz processor (when run the first time).
And this should not be necessarily a smooth procedure. Some modules may not
specify required dependencies, so one may need to repeat this procedure several
times until the results stabilize.
perl5.8.2 -MCPAN -e "install Bundle::OS2_default" < nul |& tee 00cpan_i_2
perl5.8.2 -MCPAN -e "install Bundle::OS2_default" < nul |& tee 00cpan_i_3
Even after they stabilize, some tests may fail.
Fix as many discovered bugs as possible. Document all the bugs which are not
fixed, and all the failures with unknown reasons. Inspect the produced logs
F<00cpan_i_1> to find suspiciously skipped tests, and other fishy events.
Keep in mind that I of some modules may fail too: for example,
the DLLs to update may be already loaded by F. Inspect the C
logs (in the example above F<00cpan_i_1> etc) for errors, and install things
manually, as in
cd $CPANHOME/.cpan/build/Digest-MD5-2.31
make install
Some distributions may fail some tests, but you may want to install them
anyway (as above, or via C command of C shell-mode).
Since this procedure may take quite a long time to complete, it makes sense
to "freeze" your CPAN configuration by disabling periodic updates of the
local copy of CPAN index: set C to some big value (I use 365),
then save the settings
CPAN> o conf index_expire 365
CPAN> o conf commit
Reset back to the default value C<1> when you are finished.
=item 5.
When satisfied with the results, rerun the C target. Now you
can copy C to C, and install the other OMF-build
executables: C etc. They are ready to be used.
=item 6.
Change to the C<./pod> directory of the build tree, download the Perl logo
F, and run
( perl2ipf > perl.ipf ) |& tee 00ipf
ipfc /INF perl.ipf |& tee 00inf
This produces the Perl docs online book C. Install in on
C path.
=item 7.
Now is the time to build statically linked executable F which
includes newly-installed via C modules. Doing testing
via C is going to be painfully slow, since it statically links
a new executable per XS extension.
Here is a possible workaround: create a toplevel F in
F<$CPANHOME/.cpan/build/> with contents being (compare with L)
use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;
WriteMakefile NAME => 'dummy';
execute this as
perl_5.8.2.exe Makefile.PL 's
in subdirectories may be buggy, and would not run as "child" scripts. The
interdependency of modules can strike you; however, since non-XS modules
are already installed, the prerequisites of most modules have a very good
chance to be present.
If you discover some glitches, move directories of problematic modules to a
different location; if these modules are non-XS modules, you may just ignore
them - they are already installed; the remaining, XS, modules you need to
install manually one by one.
After each such removal you need to rerun the C/C