| If you read this file _as_is_, just ignore the funny characters you see. |
| It is written in the POD format (see pod/perlpod.pod) which is specially |
| designed to be readable as is. |
| |
| =head1 NAME |
| |
| README.mint - Perl version 5 on Atari MiNT |
| |
| =head1 DESCRIPTION |
| |
| There is a binary version of perl available from the FreeMiNT project |
| http://freemint.de/ You may wish to use this instead of trying to |
| compile yourself. |
| |
| B<The following advice is from perl 5.004_02 and is probably rather |
| out of date.> |
| |
| If you want to build perl yourself on MiNT (or maybe on an Atari without |
| MiNT) you may want to accept some advice from somebody who already did it... |
| |
| There was a perl port for Atari ST done by ++jrb bammi@cadence.com. |
| This port tried very hard to build on non-MiNT-systems. For the |
| sake of efficiency I've left this way. Yet, I haven't removed bammi's |
| patches but left them intact. Unfortunately some of the files that |
| bammi contributed to the perl distribution seem to have vanished? |
| |
| So, how can you distinguish my patches from bammi's patches? All of |
| bammi's stuff is embedded in "#ifdef atarist" preprocessor macros. |
| My MiNT port uses "#ifdef __MINT__" instead (and unconditionally |
| undefines "atarist". If you want to continue on bammi's port, all |
| you have to do is to swap the "-D" and "-U" switches for "__MINT__" |
| and "atarist" in the variable ccflags. |
| |
| However, I think that my version will still run on non-MiNT-systems |
| provided that the user has a Eunuchs-like environment (i.e. the |
| standard envariables like $PATH, $HOME, ... are set, there is a |
| POSIX compliant shell in /bin/sh, and...) |
| |
| =head1 Known problems with Perl on MiNT |
| |
| The problems you may encounter when building perl on your machine |
| are most probably due to deficiencies in MiNT resp. the Atari |
| platform in general. |
| |
| First of all, if you have less than 8 MB of RAM you shouldn't |
| even try to build Perl yourself. Better grab a binary pre-compiled |
| version somewhere. Even if you have more memory you should take |
| some care. Try to run in a fresh environment (without memory |
| fragmented too much) with as few daemons, accessories, xcontrol |
| modules etc. as possible. If you run some AES you should |
| consider to start a console based environment instead. |
| |
| A problem has been reported with sed. Sed is used to create |
| some configuration files based on the answers you have given |
| to the Configure script. Unfortunately the Perl Configure script |
| shows sed on MiNT its limits. I have sed 2.05 with a stacksize |
| of 64k and I have encountered no problems. If sed crashes |
| during your configuration process you should first try to |
| augment sed's stacksize: |
| |
| fixstk 64k /usr/bin/sed |
| |
| (or similar). If it still doesn't help you may have a look |
| which other versions of sed are installed on your system. |
| If you have a KGMD 1.0 installation you will find three |
| in /usr/bin. Have a look there. |
| |
| Perl has some "mammut" C files. If gcc reports "internal |
| compiler error: program cc1 got fatal signal 10" this is very |
| likely due to a stack overflow in program cc1. Find cc1 |
| and fix its stack. I have made good experiences with |
| |
| fixstk 2 cc1 |
| |
| This doesn't establish a stack of 2 Bytes only as you might |
| think. It really reserves one half of the available memory |
| for cc1's stack. A setting of 1 would reserve the entire |
| memory for cc1, 3 would reserve three fourths. You will have |
| to find out the value that suits to your system yourself. |
| |
| To find out the location of the program "cc1" simply type |
| `gcc --print-prog-name cc1' at your shell prompt. |
| |
| Now run make (maybe "make -k"). If you get a fatal signal 10 |
| increase cc1's stacksize, if you run out of memory you should |
| either decrease the stacksize or follow some more hints: |
| |
| Perl's building process is very handy on machines with a lot |
| of virtual memory but may result in a disaster if you are short |
| of memory. If gcc fails to compile many source files you should |
| reduce the optimization. Grep for "optimize" in the file |
| config.sh and change the flags. |
| |
| If only several huge files cause problems (actually it is not a |
| matter of the file size resp. the amount of code but depends on |
| the size of the individual functions) it is useful to bypass |
| the make program and compile these files directly from the |
| command line. For example if you got something like the |
| following from make: |
| |
| CCCMD = gcc -DPERL_CORE .... |
| ... |
| ...: virtual memory exhausted |
| |
| you should hack into the shell: |
| |
| gcc -DPERL_CORE ... toke.c |
| |
| Please note that you have to add the name of the source file |
| (here toke.c) at the end. |
| |
| If none of this helps, you're helpless. Wait for a binary |
| release. If you have succeeded you may encounter another problem |
| at the linking process. If gcc complains that it can't find |
| some libraries within the perl distribution you probably have |
| an old linker. If it complains for example about "file not |
| found for xxx.olb" you should cd into the directory in |
| question and |
| |
| ln -s libxxx.a xxx.olb |
| |
| This will fix the problem. |
| |
| This version (5.00402) of perl has passed most of the tests on my system: |
| |
| Failed Test Status Wstat Total Fail Failed List of failed |
| ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| io/pipe.t 10 2 20.00% 7, 9 |
| io/tell.t 13 1 7.69% 12 |
| lib/complex.t 762 13 1.71% 84-85, 248-251, 257, 272-273, |
| 371, 380, 419-420 |
| lib/io_pipe.t 10 1 10.00% 9 |
| lib/io_tell.t 13 1 7.69% 12 |
| op/magic.t 30 2 6.67% 29-30 |
| Failed 6/152 test scripts, 96.05% okay. 20/4359 subtests failed, 99.54% okay. |
| |
| Pipes always cause problems with MiNT, it's actually a surprise that |
| most of the tests did work. I've got no idea why the "tell" test failed, |
| this shouldn't mean too big a problem however. |
| |
| Most of the failures of lib/complex seem to be harmless, actually errors |
| far right to the decimal point... Two failures seem to be serious: |
| The sign of the results is reversed. I would say that this is due |
| to minor bugs in the portable math lib that I compiled perl with. |
| |
| I haven't bothered very much to find the reason for the failures |
| with op/magic.t and op/stat.t. Maybe you'll find it out. |
| |
| ########################################################################## |
| |
| Another possible problem may arise from the implementation of the "pwd" |
| command. It happened to add a carriage return and newline to its output |
| no matter what the setting of $UNIXMODE is. This is quite annoying since many |
| library modules for perl take the output of pwd, chop off the |
| trailing newline character and then expect to see a valid path in |
| that. But the carriage return (last but second character!) isn't |
| chopped off. You can either try to patch all library modules (at |
| the price of performance for the extra transformation) or you can |
| use my version of pwd that doesn't suffer from this deficiency. |
| |
| The fixed implementation is in the mint subdirectory. Running |
| "Configure" will attempt to build and install it if necessary |
| (hints/mint.sh will do this work) but you can build and install it |
| explicitly by: |
| |
| cd mint |
| make install |
| |
| This is the fastest solution. |
| |
| Just in case you want to go the hard way: perl won't even build with a |
| broken pwd! You will have to fix the library modules |
| (ext/POSIX/POSIX.pm, lib/Cwd.pm, lib/pwd.pl) at last after building |
| miniperl. |
| |
| A major nuisance of current MiNTLib versions is the implementation |
| of system() which is far from being POSIX compliant. A real system() |
| should fork and then exec /bin/sh with its argument as a command |
| line to the shell. The MiNTLib system() however doesn't expect |
| that every user has a POSIX shell in /bin/sh. It tries to work |
| around the problem by forking and exec'ing the first token in its argument |
| string. To get a little bit of compliance to POSIX system() it |
| tries to handle at least redirection ("<" or ">") on its own |
| behalf. |
| |
| This isn't a good idea since many programs expect that they can |
| pass a command line to system() that exploits all features of a |
| POSIX shell. If you use the MiNTLib version of system() with |
| perl the Perl function system() will suffer from the same deficiencies. |
| |
| You will find a fixed version of system() in the mint subdirectory. |
| You can easily insert this version into your system libc: |
| |
| cd mint |
| make system.o |
| ar r /usr/lib/libc.a |
| ranlib /usr/lib/libc.a |
| |
| If you are suspicious you should either back up your libc before |
| or extract the original system.o from your libc with |
| "ar x /usr/lib/libc.a system.o". You can then backup the system.o |
| module somewhere before you succeed. |
| |
| Anything missing? Yep, I've almost forgotten... |
| No file in this distribution without a fine saying. Take this one: |
| |
| "From a thief you should learn: (1) to work at night; |
| (2) if one cannot gain what one wants in one night to |
| try again the next night; (3) to love one's coworkers |
| just as thieves love each other; (4) to be willing to |
| risk one's life even for a little thing; (5) not to |
| attach too much value to things even though one has |
| risked one's life for them - just as a thief will resell |
| a stolen article for a fraction of its real value; |
| (6) to withstand all kinds of beatings and tortures |
| but to remain what you are; and (7) to believe your |
| work is worthwhile and not be willing to change it." |
| |
| -- Rabbi Dov Baer, Maggid of Mezeritch |
| |
| OK, this was my motto while working on Perl for MiNT, especially rule (1)... |
| |
| Have fun with Perl! |
| |
| =head1 AUTHOR |
| |
| Guido Flohr |
| |
| mailto:guido@FreeMiNT.de |