On Sep 1, 2010, at 12:55 PM, Eric Robertson wrote:
A few days ago I downloaded the perl-5.12.1.tar.gz tarball from CPAN and built it on my Alphaserver ES40 running OpenVMS V8.3 and DECC V7.3-009. I have attached a file containing selected excerpts from that build. My build of the previous 5.12.1 release produced fewer test failures (17) than did than Martin Vorländer's reported build of 5.12.2 RC1 (37). So, judging solely by the number of failed tests, it looks like 5.12.2 RC1 might have broken more things than it fixed.
That's extremely unlikely -- it's a pretty modest and conservative release. Of course if there is something seriously wrong, I want to know about it.
For good or for ill a lot of it comes down to environmental differences: note Martin and me getting 37 vs. 0 test failures, but both on OpenVMS I64 v8.3-1H1 with exactly the same compiler version. Some of the tests seem to be very sensitive to the environment. Different definitions of DECC$* logicals and others, different quotas and protections, different volume settings (special files on or off, write-behind caching on or off), etc.
It would be nice to get a handle on all of these differences and make the tests immune to them, but that's not something I can do alone. So I do appreciate reports, especially those that come with analysis of exactly what went wrong and why.
Also, there are some warnings that I have included in the attached excerpt file. I was not sure if these warnings were significant (this is the first time that I have built perl from scratch on OpenVMS). So you can ignore them if experience tells you that they are not significant.
I think a lot of the warnings are not VMS-specific, and are probably not optimal but aren't considered a high priority. The long symbol truncations are VMS-specific and are there to warn anyone linking an extension against an external library that there may be trouble.
________________________________________ Craig A. Berry mailto:craigbe...@mac.com "... getting out of a sonnet is much more difficult than getting in." Brad Leithauser
