mingw/html/pod/perlmint.html

   1 <?xml version="1.0" ?>
   2 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
   3 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
   4 <head>
   5 <title>README.mint - Perl version 5 on Atari MiNT</title>
   6 <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
   7 <link rev="made" href="mailto:" />
   8 </head>
   9
  10 <body style="background-color: white">
  11 <table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3">
  12 <tr><td class="block" style="background-color: #cccccc" valign="middle">
  13 <big><strong><span class="block">&nbsp;README.mint - Perl version 5 on Atari MiNT</span></strong></big>
  14 </td></tr>
  15 </table>
  16
  17 <p><a name="__index__"></a></p>
  18 <!-- INDEX BEGIN -->
  19
  20 <ul>
  21
  22         <li><a href="#name">NAME</a></li>
  23         <li><a href="#description">DESCRIPTION</a></li>
  24         <li><a href="#known_problems_with_perl_on_mint">Known problems with Perl on MiNT</a></li>
  25         <li><a href="#author">AUTHOR</a></li>
  26 </ul>
  27 <!-- INDEX END -->
  28
  29 <hr />
  30 <p>
  31 </p>
  32 <h1><a name="name">NAME</a></h1>
  33 <p>README.mint - Perl version 5 on Atari MiNT</p>
  34 <p>
  35 </p>
  36 <hr />
  37 <h1><a name="description">DESCRIPTION</a></h1>
  38 <p>There is a binary version of perl available from the FreeMiNT project
  39 <a href="http://freemint.de/">http://freemint.de/</a>  You may wish to use this instead of trying to
  40 compile yourself.</p>
  41 <p><strong>The following advice is from perl 5.004_02 and is probably rather
  42 out of date.</strong></p>
  43 <p>If you want to build perl yourself on MiNT (or maybe on an Atari without
  44 MiNT) you may want to accept some advice from somebody who already did it...</p>
  45 <p>There was a perl port for Atari ST done by ++jrb <a href="mailto:bammi@cadence.com.">bammi@cadence.com.</a>
  46 This port tried very hard to build on non-MiNT-systems.  For the
  47 sake of efficiency I've left this way.  Yet, I haven't removed bammi's
  48 patches but left them intact.  Unfortunately some of the files that
  49 bammi contributed to the perl distribution seem to have vanished?</p>
  50 <p>So, how can you distinguish my patches from bammi's patches?  All of
  51 bammi's stuff is embedded in ``#ifdef atarist'' preprocessor macros.
  52 My MiNT port uses ``#ifdef __MINT__'' instead (and unconditionally
  53 undefines ``atarist''.  If you want to continue on bammi's port, all
  54 you have to do is to swap the ``-D'' and ``-U'' switches for ``__MINT__''
  55 and ``atarist'' in the variable ccflags.</p>
  56 <p>However, I think that my version will still run on non-MiNT-systems
  57 provided that the user has a Eunuchs-like environment (i.e. the
  58 standard envariables like $PATH, $HOME, ... are set, there is a
  59 POSIX compliant shell in /bin/sh, and...)</p>
  60 <p>
  61 </p>
  62 <hr />
  63 <h1><a name="known_problems_with_perl_on_mint">Known problems with Perl on MiNT</a></h1>
  64 <p>The problems you may encounter when building perl on your machine
  65 are most probably due to deficiencies in MiNT resp. the Atari
  66 platform in general.</p>
  67 <p>First of all, if you have less than 8 MB of RAM you shouldn't
  68 even try to build Perl yourself.  Better grab a binary pre-compiled
  69 version somewhere.  Even if you have more memory you should take
  70 some care.  Try to run in a fresh environment (without memory
  71 fragmented too much) with as few daemons, accessories, xcontrol
  72 modules etc. as possible.  If you run some AES you should
  73 consider to start a console based environment instead.</p>
  74 <p>A problem has been reported with sed.  Sed is used to create
  75 some configuration files based on the answers you have given
  76 to the Configure script.  Unfortunately the Perl Configure script
  77 shows sed on MiNT its limits.  I have sed 2.05 with a stacksize
  78 of 64k and I have encountered no problems.  If sed crashes
  79 during your configuration process you should first try to
  80 augment sed's stacksize:</p>
  81 <pre>
  82         fixstk 64k /usr/bin/sed</pre>
  83 <p>(or similar).  If it still doesn't help you may have a look
  84 which other versions of sed are installed on your system.
  85 If you have a KGMD 1.0 installation you will find three
  86 in /usr/bin.  Have a look there.</p>
  87 <p>Perl has some ``mammut'' C files.  If gcc reports ``internal
  88 compiler error: program cc1 got fatal signal 10'' this is very
  89 likely due to a stack overflow in program cc1. Find cc1
  90 and fix its stack.  I have made good experiences with</p>
  91 <pre>
  92         fixstk 2 cc1</pre>
  93 <p>This doesn't establish a stack of 2 Bytes only as you might
  94 think.  It really reserves one half of the available memory
  95 for cc1's stack.  A setting of 1 would reserve the entire
  96 memory for cc1, 3 would reserve three fourths.  You will have
  97 to find out the value that suits to your system yourself.</p>
  98 <p>To find out the location of the program ``cc1'' simply type
  99 `gcc --print-prog-name cc1' at your shell prompt.</p>
 100 <p>Now run make (maybe ``make -k'').  If you get a fatal signal 10
 101 increase cc1's stacksize, if you run out of memory you should
 102 either decrease the stacksize or follow some more hints:</p>
 103 <p>Perl's building process is very handy on machines with a lot
 104 of virtual memory but may result in a disaster if you are short
 105 of memory.  If gcc fails to compile many source files you should
 106 reduce the optimization.  Grep for ``optimize'' in the file
 107 config.sh and change the flags.</p>
 108 <p>If only several huge files cause problems (actually it is not a
 109 matter of the file size resp. the amount of code but depends on
 110 the size of the individual functions) it is useful to bypass
 111 the make program and compile these files directly from the
 112 command line.  For example if you got something like the
 113 following from make:</p>
 114 <pre>
 115         CCCMD = gcc -DPERL_CORE ....
 116         ...
 117         ...: virtual memory exhausted</pre>
 118 <p>you should hack into the shell:</p>
 119 <pre>
 120         gcc -DPERL_CORE ... toke.c</pre>
 121 <p>Please note that you have to add the name of the source file
 122 (here toke.c) at the end.</p>
 123 <p>If none of this helps, you're helpless.  Wait for a binary
 124 release.  If you have succeeded you may encounter another problem
 125 at the linking process.  If gcc complains that it can't find
 126 some libraries within the perl distribution you probably have
 127 an old linker.  If it complains for example about ``file not
 128 found for xxx.olb'' you should cd into the directory in
 129 question and</p>
 130 <pre>
 131         ln -s libxxx.a xxx.olb</pre>
 132 <p>This will fix the problem.</p>
 133 <p>This version (5.00402) of perl has passed most of the tests on my system:</p>
 134 <pre>
 135  Failed Test  Status Wstat Total Fail  Failed  List of failed
 136  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 137  io/pipe.t                    10    2  20.00%  7, 9
 138  io/tell.t                    13    1   7.69%  12
 139  lib/complex.t               762   13   1.71%  84-85, 248-251, 257, 272-273,
 140                                                371, 380, 419-420
 141  lib/io_pipe.t                10    1  10.00%  9
 142  lib/io_tell.t                13    1   7.69%  12
 143  op/magic.t                   30    2   6.67%  29-30
 144  Failed 6/152 test scripts, 96.05% okay. 20/4359 subtests failed, 99.54% okay.</pre>
 145 <p>Pipes always cause problems with MiNT, it's actually a surprise that
 146 most of the tests did work.  I've got no idea why the ``tell'' test failed,
 147 this shouldn't mean too big a problem however.</p>
 148 <p>Most of the failures of lib/complex seem to be harmless, actually errors
 149 far right to the decimal point...  Two failures seem to be serious:
 150 The sign of the results is reversed.  I would say that this is due
 151 to minor bugs in the portable math lib that I compiled perl with.</p>
 152 <p>I haven't bothered very much to find the reason for the failures
 153 with op/magic.t and op/stat.t.  Maybe you'll find it out.</p>
 154 <p>##########################################################################</p>
 155 <p>Another possible problem may arise from the implementation of the ``pwd''
 156 command.  It happened to add a carriage return and newline to its output
 157 no matter what the setting of $UNIXMODE is.  This is quite annoying since many
 158 library modules for perl take the output of pwd, chop off the
 159 trailing newline character and then expect to see a valid path in
 160 that.  But the carriage return (last but second character!) isn't
 161 chopped off.  You can either try to patch all library modules (at
 162 the price of performance for the extra transformation) or you can
 163 use my version of pwd that doesn't suffer from this deficiency.</p>
 164 <p>The fixed implementation is in the mint subdirectory.  Running
 165 ``Configure'' will attempt to build and install it if necessary
 166 (hints/mint.sh will do this work) but you can build and install it
 167 explicitly by:</p>
 168 <pre>
 169         cd mint
 170         make install</pre>
 171 <p>This is the fastest solution.</p>
 172 <p>Just in case you want to go the hard way: perl won't even build with a
 173 broken pwd!  You will have to fix the library modules
 174 (ext/POSIX/POSIX.pm, lib/Cwd.pm, lib/pwd.pl) at last after building
 175 miniperl.</p>
 176 <p>A major nuisance of current MiNTLib versions is the implementation
 177 of <a href="file://C|\msysgit\mingw\html/pod/perlfunc.html#item_system"><code>system()</code></a> which is far from being POSIX compliant.  A real <a href="file://C|\msysgit\mingw\html/pod/perlfunc.html#item_system"><code>system()</code></a>
 178 should fork and then exec /bin/sh with its argument as a command
 179 line to the shell.  The MiNTLib <a href="file://C|\msysgit\mingw\html/pod/perlfunc.html#item_system"><code>system()</code></a> however doesn't expect
 180 that every user has a POSIX shell in /bin/sh.  It tries to work
 181 around the problem by forking and exec'ing the first token in its argument
 182 string.  To get a little bit of compliance to POSIX <a href="file://C|\msysgit\mingw\html/pod/perlfunc.html#item_system"><code>system()</code></a> it
 183 tries to handle at least redirection (``&lt;'' or ``&gt;'') on its own
 184 behalf.</p>
 185 <p>This isn't a good idea since many programs expect that they can
 186 pass a command line to <a href="file://C|\msysgit\mingw\html/pod/perlfunc.html#item_system"><code>system()</code></a> that exploits all features of a
 187 POSIX shell.  If you use the MiNTLib version of <a href="file://C|\msysgit\mingw\html/pod/perlfunc.html#item_system"><code>system()</code></a> with
 188 perl the Perl function <a href="file://C|\msysgit\mingw\html/pod/perlfunc.html#item_system"><code>system()</code></a> will suffer from the same deficiencies.</p>
 189 <p>You will find a fixed version of <a href="file://C|\msysgit\mingw\html/pod/perlfunc.html#item_system"><code>system()</code></a> in the mint subdirectory.
 190 You can easily insert this version into your system libc:</p>
 191 <pre>
 192         cd mint
 193         make system.o
 194         ar r /usr/lib/libc.a
 195         ranlib /usr/lib/libc.a</pre>
 196 <p>If you are suspicious you should either back up your libc before
 197 or extract the original system.o from your libc with
 198 ``ar x /usr/lib/libc.a system.o''.  You can then backup the system.o
 199 module somewhere before you succeed.</p>
 200 <p>Anything missing?  Yep, I've almost forgotten...
 201 No file in this distribution without a fine saying.  Take this one:</p>
 202 <pre>
 203         &quot;From a thief you should learn: (1) to work at night;
 204         (2) if one cannot gain what one wants in one night to
 205         try again the next night; (3) to love one's coworkers
 206         just as thieves love each other; (4) to be willing to
 207         risk one's life even for a little thing; (5) not to
 208         attach too much value to things even though one has
 209         risked one's life for them - just as a thief will resell
 210         a stolen article for a fraction of its real value;
 211         (6) to withstand all kinds of beatings and tortures
 212         but to remain what you are; and (7) to believe your
 213         work is worthwhile and not be willing to change it.&quot;</pre>
 214 <pre>
 215                         -- Rabbi Dov Baer, Maggid of Mezeritch</pre>
 216 <p>OK, this was my motto while working on Perl for MiNT, especially rule (1)...</p>
 217 <p>Have fun with Perl!</p>
 218 <p>
 219 </p>
 220 <hr />
 221 <h1><a name="author">AUTHOR</a></h1>
 222 <p>Guido Flohr</p>
 223 <pre>
 224         <a href="mailto:guido@FreeMiNT.de">mailto:guido@FreeMiNT.de</a></pre>
 225 <table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3">
 226 <tr><td class="block" style="background-color: #cccccc" valign="middle">
 227 <big><strong><span class="block">&nbsp;README.mint - Perl version 5 on Atari MiNT</span></strong></big>
 228 </td></tr>
 229 </table>
 230
 231 </body>
 232
 233 </html>