I am not usually quick to install new versions of Perl due to the effort involved in reinstalling all of the extensions I use so please let me add my vote of thanks to the maintainers of Perl on VMS for how much easier it becomes with each new release. I have recently installed Perl v5.12.1 on my cluster, which is a mixed-architecture cluster containing an Alpha and Integrity system. Save for a slight glitch I had with a logical name that conflicted with the build, the process went very smoothly. At the end of this message is a list of the extensions I have installed so far. These are the issues I encountered with this installation:
1. The file SV.C has an uncorrected questionable compare left in its UTF8 code. This can be changed to a simple compare to zero. 2. The file git_version.h is not copied to the installation directory. It is referenced by some extensions, HTML::Parser being an example. 3. Extensions that use inc::Module::Install fail to build an MMS file. I have to rewrite them to use ExtUtils::MakeMaker. 4. Too many extensions like to use labels that differ only in case or reference external libraries that are built with /names=(as_is,short). By editing 3 include files in Perl, extern.h, perl.h, and xsub.h in PERL_ROOT:[.LIB.VMS_arch.5_12_1.CORE], to set the NAMES pragma to uppercase at the beginning of the file and restore it at the end, I am able to modify the generated DESCRIP.MMS file of the extension being built to include the names=(as_is,short) switch and build the extension without difficulty. I believe this would be worth doing as part of the standard installation. It would also be nice if there were an option to add this switch into the generated DESCRIP.MMS automatically. 5. The extension build process still believes any file that does not conform to ODS-2 syntax has been renamed using underscores. Since my home directory is on an ODS-5 disk, and cpanplus places its work files in the home directory, I frequently get reports of missing files while processing makefile.pl. The error appears to be cosmetic, however, and the build still completes successfully. In all cases, cpanplus was used to start the build of the extension. In many cases, that was all it took. When the build aborted, usually due to reason 3, I stepped into the directory, corrected the problem (editing makefile.pl, editing the resulting descrip.mms when necessary, adding in any necessary external libraries), then manually completed the install of the extension in question, then reissued the cpanp command if the extension that aborted was a prerequisite. This allowed all the extensions I use to be installed very quickly and I did not have to do any manual fetching (except for VMS::Logical) and walking of the prerequisite tree on my own. Again, thanks very much for making this process much easier than it used to be. For reference, here is the list of extensions I have added to my system. Authen::SASL Class::Inspector Convert::ASN1 Crypt::Blowfish Crypt::CBC Crypt::DES Crypt::IDEA Crypt::SSLeay DBD::SQLite DBD::mysql DBI Digest::HMAC Digest::SHA1 Email::Date::Format FCGI HTML::Parser HTML::Tagset HTML::Tidy IO::Socket::SSL IO::Stringy Image::Magick LWP MAIL MIME::Lite MIME::Tools MIME::Types Net::IDN::Encode Net::IDN::Nameprep Net::IP Net::LDAP Net::SNMP Net::SSLeay PDF::API2 SOAP::Lite SOAP::Transport::FTP TIMEDATE Task::Weaken Test::NoWarnings Test::Pod Text::Iconv URI Unicode::Stringprep VMS::Logical XML::Filter::BufferText XML::NamespaceSupport XML::Parser XML::SAX XML::SAX::Writer Mark Berryman
