perlmachten

PERLMACHTEN(1)	       Perl Programmers Reference Guide	       PERLMACHTEN(1)



NAME
       README.machten - Perl version 5 on Power MachTen systems

DESCRIPTION
       This document describes how to build Perl 5 on Power MachTen systems,
       and discusses a few wrinkles in the implementation.

       Perl version 5.8.x and greater not supported

       Power MachTen is not supported by versions of Perl later than 5.6.x.
       If you wish to build a version from the 5.6 track, please obtain a
       source distribution from the archive at <http://cpan.org/src/5.0/> and
       follow the instructions in its README.machten file.

       MachTen is no longer supported by its developers, Tenon Intersystems.
       A UNIX environment hosted on Mac OS Classic, MachTen has been super-
       seded by Mac OS X and by BSD and Linux implementations for Macintosh
       hardware.  The final version of Power MachTen, 4.1.4, lacks many fea-
       tures found in modern implementations of UNIX, and has a number of
       bugs.  These shortcomings prevent recent versions of Perl from being
       able to use extensions on MachTen, and cause numerous test suite fail-
       ures in the perl core.

       In September 2003, a discussion on the MachTen mailing list determined
       that there was no interest in making a later version of Perl build
       successfully on MachTen.	 Consequently, support for building Perl
       under MachTen has been suppressed in Perl distributions published
       after February 2004.  The hints file, hints/machten.sh, remains a part
       of the distributions for reference purposes.

       Compiling Perl 5.6.x on MachTen

       To compile perl 5.6.x under MachTen 4.1.4 (and probably earlier ver-
       sions):

	 ./Configure -de
	 make
	 make test
	 make install

       This builds and installs a statically-linked perl; MachTen’s dynamic
       linking facilities are not adequate to support Perl’s use of dynami-
       cally linked libraries.	(See hints/machten.sh for more information.)

       You should have at least 32 megabytes of free memory on your system
       before running the "make" command.

       For much more information on building perl -- for example, on how to
       change the default installation directory -- see INSTALL.

       Failures during "make test" on MachTen


       op/lexassign.t
	   This test may fail when first run after building perl.  It does
	   not fail subsequently.  The cause is unknown.

       pragma/warnings.t
	   Test 257 fails due to a failure to warn about attempts to read
	   from a filehandle which is a duplicate of stdout when stdout is
	   attached to a pipe.	The output of the test contains a block com-
	   ment which discusses a different failure, not applicable to
	   MachTen.

	   The root of the problem is that Machten does not assign a file
	   type to either end of a pipe (see stat), resulting, among other
	   things in Perl’s "-p" test failing on file descriptors belonging
	   to pipes.  As a result, perl becomes confused, and the test for
	   reading from a write-only file fails.  I am reluctant to patch
	   perl to get around this, as it’s clearly an OS bug (about which
	   Tenon has been informed), and limited in its effect on practical
	   Perl programs.

       Building external modules on MachTen

       To add an external module to perl, build in the normal way, which is
       documented in ExtUtils::MakeMaker, or which can be driven automati-
       cally by the CPAN module (see CPAN), which is part of the standard
       distribution.  If you want to install a module which contains XS code
       (C or C++ source which compiles to object code for linking with perl),
       you will have to replace your perl binary with a new version contain-
       ing the new statically-linked object module.  The build process tells
       you how to do this.

       There is a gotcha, however, which users usually encounter immediately
       they respond to CPAN’s invitation to "install Bundle::CPAN". When
       installing a bundle -- a group of modules which together achieve some
       particular purpose, the installation process for later modules in the
       bundle tends to assume that earlier modules have been fully installed
       and are available for use.  This is not true on a statically-linked
       system for earlier modules which contain XS code.  As a result the
       installation of the bundle fails.  The work-around is not to install
       the bundle as a one-shot operation, but instead to see what modules it
       contains, and install these one-at-a-time by hand in the order given.

AUTHOR
       Dominic Dunlop <domo@computer.org>

DATE
       Version 1.1.0 2004-02-13



perl v5.8.8			  2006-01-07		       PERLMACHTEN(1)