On Monday 12 November 2007 10:43:02 Andy Dougherty wrote: > After looking into it some, the problem seems to be that these tests > rely on init::defaults. That simply won't work if the configuration > being used to build parrot is sufficiently different from that which > was used to build perl. That's what happened to me in this case. > > This probably doesn't show up often because nearly everyone building > parrot right now uses the same configuration as was used to build perl. > However, that's not necessarily the norm. Vendors such as Sun supply > a perl pre-built with their compiler, but many end users have gcc > installed instead. > > If a test for a configuration step relies on certain Config values, the > only correct approach is to use the Config values determined by > Configure.pl. There is no guarantee that the init::defaults values will > work. They may well have been changed, either by the user (via --ask or > command line overrides) or by the Configure.pl system itself.
I can confirm this; this assumption seems to be the source of the "I don't have libgdbm on my system; please stop trying to link to it!" errors I've seen on and off for the past few weeks. The build-time characteristics of Perl have very little connection to the development environment available for Parrot, except for maybe Gentoo or other Linux-from-Scratch systems. (I'm not sure we can even assume a direct connection with FreeBSD.) -- c
