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File: perl5.004_01-dc2.tar.gz
Author: Tom Spindler, dogcow@umich.edu
Release: 30 Sep 1997
Compatibility: DR9
Location: contrib/lang
Description: perl5 for the BeOS
Notes:

This is perl5.004_01, for PPC BeOS, dogcow release 2
(http://www.be.com/beware/Languages.html#perl5-dc has the latest version.)

The README that comes with the (source) distribution of perl5.004_01 is
licenses/README. The original source distribution for perl5 (in addition
to a lot of other perl info) can be found at your friendly neighborhood
CPAN mirror, or at http://www.perl.com/ .

To install:
move the contents of the bin and lib directories to /boot/home/config.
You can do this easily by typing './install'.

Note that you do have to have "/boot/home/config/bin" in your path for
the shell to find perl, though. (You can change this in
/boot/home/config/boot/UserBootscript.)


I hope that you find this port useful, but I give no warranty for it, nor
do I take any liability if it does something nasty. Run it at your own
risk, blah blah, more legal yammering here. Oh, read the stuff in licenses/.

Tom Spindler, dogcow@umich.edu, 30 Sep 1997
------
Anyway, notable features that don't work and other tech stuff:

Sockets are utterly hosed. Don't even bother with them right now.

Signals are... touchy. They may get processed in the wrong order, and
definitely don't use the POSIX module signal stuff or sigaction unless
you want perl to crash.

perl will complain loudly if it can't find its libraries in
/boot/home/config/lib. (Hi, Jon! Yeah, I know I said I'd fix this...)

Shared libraries will not work (at this time) with perl - i.e. you
can't use dynamic libraries with perl, you have to compile them in.

There's no DB support in this version of perl. at all.

Term::Readline appears to be rather broken.

The output of the perl test suite is in the portinfo dir, along with
the set of patches so you can build perl yourself. Right now, it's
98.7% or so working, with the second DR9 update installed. (There were
some highly bad problems with pipes prior to the second update.)

In order to compile perl, it's highly helpful to have the following:

geek gadgets find and make; gnu cpp (not sure if this is in gg yet);
my hacked up version of strtod.c that gets around the problems with
printing/scanfing/atofing doubles (grrrrr!) and my version of config.sh
(found as config.sh.dc) which gets around problems with configure.

In addition, you need to ln -s /boot /usr, and
ln -s /boot/develop/headers/posix /usr/include for some of the
preprocessing and makefile dependency generation to work. (Eventually,
I'll get the makedepend script to use mwcc -make and dispense with
this /usr and cpp dillydallying .)

Have fun! If you have any patches or suggestions, please feel free to
pass them along.