On Wednesday, April 11, 2007, at 09:48AM, "John E. Malmberg" <[EMAIL
PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Andrew Black wrote:
>> Craig A. Berry wrote:
>>> At 9:57 AM +0000 2/28/07, Andrew Black (delete obvious bit) wrote:
>>>> Hi
>>>> A quick progress report. I worked out roughly what is going on but
>>>> hadnt
>>>> had time to write up in more detail. I am now on holiday and don't have
>>>> access to the machine at work.
>>
>>
>> It is doing funny things with path names. I have added some diagnostics
>> and it is trying to add .exe to perl.;1
>> The regexp seems to handle the ;1 but not the .;1
>>
>> ******* $thisperl=disk:[scratch.perl595.][t]perl.;1
>> ******* $thisperl becomes disk:[scratch.perl595.][t]perl.;1.exe
>>
>> print STDERR "******* \$thisperl=$thisperl\n" ;
>> if ($proto->os_type eq 'VMS') {
>> # VMS might have a file version at the end
>> $thisperl .= $exe unless $thisperl =~ m/$exe(;\d+)?$/i;
>> } elsif (defined $exe) {
>> $thisperl .= $exe unless $thisperl =~ m/$exe$/i;
>> }
>> print STDERR "******* \$thisperl becomes $thisperl\n" ;
>
>VMS does not enforce executables having .EXE extensions.
True, but flouting the convention does seem like asking for trouble.
>The test harness for VMS runs a perl binary with the name
>"dev:[dirs]PERL." or "/dev/dirs/perl" which the above code will not handle.
It doesn't anymore. It used to, probably because a hundred years ago there
were things in the test suite that depended on finding a file named simply
"perl" in the t directory, but the test infrastructure is much better now, and
there was no good reason I could think of not to follow the local convention,
so we now keep the extension when we copy the executable to [.t].
>
>The trailing period on the filename is significant for the VMS format
>and should not be present for the UNIX format. In VMS format, it
>indicates that there is no file type present, so not to assume a default
>extension of .EXE .
>
>The above code appears to be wrong in that if the image name for the
>running perl does not have a .EXE extension, it will always generate the
>wrong answer, and will only work the existing image has the .EXE
>extension, where the above code is not even needed.
>
>I can not test this right now, but I suspect if you remove the VMS
>specific code above, then it should just work for all cases on VMS.
It doesn't. The code to paste on an extension could probably be made better
but isn't a priority.
>On VMS the image name returned by $X will always be usable as-is and
>never needs a .EXE appended to it.
The code in question is a fallback and is only used if two or three other
methods for locating Perl fail. The first thing it tries is $^X and checks if
it's considered an absolute file spec. It clearly is, so why that didn't work
is of more interest than any discussions of extension pasting.
