In an effort to get a little more information on the errors I encountered during my Perl build I've tried to run the ./perl harness mentioned at the end of MMK TEST. You can see how I managed this at the top of the logfile linked to below.
I know the README.VMS specifies other methods for getting additional information on tests, but this actually gave the following at the end of being run...
Failed 178/766 test scripts, 76.76% okay. 216/44916 subtests failed, 99.52% okay.
The log file from running this in batch can be found at
http://vmsbox.cjb.net/perl/harness.log
From the logfile it's clear there is a general problem locating libraries in the build tree. I'm not sure offhand why that happens, but I would try replacing
$ perl harness
with
$ perl -"I[-.lib]" harness
If that doesn't get you anywhere, you can try adding a perl_root definition at the top of your batch job, though this isn't supposed to be necessary to run the tests:
$ define/trans=concealed perl_root disk$perl:[5_8_1.]
Is this useful, and are there any extra steps I should take to improve the quality of information in this?
At the moment it's mainly telling us that the harness doesn't work quite like the instructions say it will (neither of the workarounds suggested above should be necessary). It'd be nice to figure out why that's happening. We're not really seeing anything we can trust about individual tests, though.
