PERLVMESA(A)     Perl Programmers Reference Guide    PERLVMESA(A)



NAME
       README.vmesa - building and installing Perl for VM/ESA.

SYNOPSIS
       This document will help you Configure, build, test and
       install Perl on VM/ESA.

DESCRIPTION
       This is a fully ported perl for VM/ESA 2.3.0.  It may work
       on other versions, but that's the one we've tested it on.

       If you've downloaded the binary distribution, it needs to
       be installed below /usr/local.  Source code distributions
       have an automated `make install` step that means you do
       not need to extract the source code below /usr/local
       (though that is where it will be installed by default).
       You may need to worry about the networking configuration
       files discussed in the last bullet below.

       Unpacking

       To extract an ASCII tar archive on VM/ESA, try this:

          pax -o to=IBM-1047,from=ISO8859-1 -r < latest.tar


       Setup and utilities

       GNU make for VM/ESA, which may be required for the build
       of perl, is available from:

         http://pucc.princeton.edu/~neale/vmoe.html


       Configure

       Once you've unpacked the distribution, run Configure (see
       INSTALL for full discussion of the Configure options), and
       then run make, then "make test" then "make install" (this
       last step may require UID=0 privileges).

       There is a "hints" file for vmesa that specifies the cor-
       rect values for most things.  Some things to watch out for
       are:

       o   this port does support dynamic loading but it's not
           had much testing

       o   Don't turn on the compiler optimization flag "-O".
           There's a bug in the compiler (APAR PQ18812) that gen-
           erates some bad code the optimizer is on.

       o   As VM/ESA doesn't fully support the fork() API pro-
           grams relying on this call will not work. I've
           replaced fork()/exec() with spawn() and the standalone
           exec() with spawn(). This has a side effect when open-
           ing unnamed pipes in a shell script: there is no child
           process generated under.

       o   At the moment the hints file for VM/ESA basically
           bypasses all of the automatic configuration process.
           This is because Configure relies on: 1. The header
           files living in the Byte File System (you could put
           the there if you want); 2. The C preprocessor includ-
           ing the #include statements in the preprocessor output
           (.i) file.

       testing anomalies

       The `make test` step runs a Perl Verification Procedure,
       usually before installation.  As the 5.6.1 kit was was
       being assembled the following "failures" were known to
       appear on some machines during `make test` (mostly due to
       ASCII vs. EBCDIC conflicts), your results may differ:

       [the list of failures being compiled]

       Usage Hints

       When using perl on VM/ESA please keep in mind that the
       EBCDIC and ASCII character sets are different.  Perl
       builtin functions that may behave differently under EBCDIC
       are mentioned in the perlport.pod document.

       OpenEdition (UNIX System Services) does not (yet) support
       the #! means of script invocation.  See:

           head `whence perldoc`

       for an example of how to use the "eval exec" trick to ask
       the shell to have perl run your scripts for you.

AUTHORS
       Neale Ferguson.

SEE ALSO
       INSTALL, perlport, perlebcdic.

       Mailing list

       If you are interested in the VM and OS/390 ports of perl
       then see the perl-mvs mailing list: The Perl Institute
       (http://www.perl.org/) maintains a mailing list of inter-
       est to all folks building and/or using perl on EBCDIC
       platforms.  To subscribe, send a message of:

           subscribe perl-mvs

       to majordomo@perl.org.

          See also:

           http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=perl-mvs

       There are web archives of the mailing list at:

           http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl-mvs/
           http://archive.develooper.com/perl-mvs@perl.org/




perl v5.6.1                 2001-03-03               PERLVMESA(A)