perlbeos

PERLBEOS(1)            Perl Programmers Reference Guide            PERLBEOS(1)



NAME
       README.beos - Perl version 5 on BeOS

DESCRIPTION
       Notes for building Perl under BeOS.

       General Issues with Perl on BeOS

       To compile perl under BeOS R4 x86:

               ./Configure -d

       and hit ^C when it asks you if you want to make changes to config.sh;
       edit config.sh and do the following: change d_socket='define' to
       ='undef'; remove SDBM, Errno, and Socket from dynamic_ext= and
       nonxs_ext=; add '#define bool short' to x2p/a2p.h;

               ../Configure -S; make; make install

               cd ~/config/lib; ln -s 5.00502/BeOS-BePC/CORE/libperl.so .

       (substitute 5.00502 with the appropriate filename)

       BeOS Release-specific Notes


       R4 x86
           Dynamic loading finally works! Yay! This means you can compile your
           own modules into perl. However, Sockets and Errno still don't work.
           (Hopefully, sockets will at least work by R5, if not sooner.)

       R4 PPC
           I have not tested this. I rather severely doubt that dynamic load-
           ing will work. (My BeBox is in pieces right now, following a nasty
           disk crash.) You may have to disable dynamic loading to get the
           thing to compile at all. (use `./Configure` without -d, and say
           'no' to 'Build a shared libperl.so'.)

       Contact Information

       If you have comments, problem reports, or even patches or bugfixes
       (gasp!)  please email me.

       28 Jan 1999 Tom Spindler dogcow@isi.net

       Update 2002-05-30

       The following tests fail on 5.8.0 Perl in BeOS Personal 5.03:

        t/op/lfs............................FAILED at test 17
        t/op/magic..........................FAILED at test 24
        ext/Fcntl/t/syslfs..................FAILED at test 17
        ext/File/Glob/t/basic...............FAILED at test 3
        ext/POSIX/t/sigaction...............FAILED at test 13
        ext/POSIX/t/waitpid.................FAILED at test 1

       The reasons for the failures are as follows:

       o   The t/op/lfs and ext/Fcntl/t/syslfs failures indicate that the LFS
           (large file support, files larger than 2 gigabytes) doesn't work
           from Perl (BeFS itself is well capable of supporting large files).
           What fails is that trying to position the file pointer past 2
           gigabytes doesn't work right, the position gets truncated to its
           lower 32 bits.

       o   The op/magic failures look like something funny going on with $0
           and $^X that I can't now figure out: none of the generated path-
           names are wrong as such, they just seem to accumulate "./" prefixes
           and infixes in ways that define logic.

       o   The Glob/t/basic indicates a bug in the getpw*() functions: they do
           not always return the correct user db entries.

       o   The sigaction #13 means that signal mask doesn't get properly
           restored if sigaction returns early.

       o   The waitpid failure means that after there are no more child pro-
           cesses, waitpid is supposed to start returning -1 (and set errno to
           ECHILD).  In BeOS, it doesn't seem to.

       Disclaimer: I just installed BeOS Personal Edition 5.0 and the Devel-
       oper Tools, that is the whole extent of my BeOS expertise, so please
       don't ask me for further help in BeOS Perl problems.

       jhi@iki.fi



perl v5.8.6                       2004-11-05                       PERLBEOS(1)