| If you read this file _as_is_, just ignore the funny characters you | |
| see. It is written in the POD format (see perlpod manpage) which is | |
| specially designed to be readable as is. | |
| =head1 NAME | |
| perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS | |
| =head1 NOTE | |
| B<Perl 5.8.0 cannot be built in AmigaOS. You can use either the | |
| maintenance release Perl 5.6.1 or the development release Perl 5.7.2 | |
| in AmigaOS. See L</"PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS"> if you want to help | |
| fixing this problem.> | |
| =head1 SYNOPSIS | |
| One can read this document in the following formats: | |
| man perlamiga | |
| multiview perlamiga.guide | |
| to list some (not all may be available simultaneously), or it may | |
| be read I<as is>: either as F<README.amiga>, or F<pod/perlamiga.pod>. | |
| A recent version of perl for the Amiga can be found at the Geek Gadgets | |
| section of the Aminet: | |
| http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/dev/gg | |
| =cut | |
| Contents | |
| perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS | |
| NAME | |
| SYNOPSIS | |
| DESCRIPTION | |
| - Prerequisites | |
| - Starting Perl programs under AmigaOS | |
| - Shortcomings of Perl under AmigaOS | |
| INSTALLATION | |
| Accessing documentation | |
| - Manpages | |
| - HTML | |
| - GNU info files | |
| - LaTeX docs | |
| BUILD | |
| - Build Prerequisites | |
| - Getting the perl source | |
| - Application of the patches | |
| - Making | |
| - Testing | |
| - Installing the built perl | |
| AUTHOR | |
| SEE ALSO | |
| =head1 DESCRIPTION | |
| =head2 Prerequisites for Compiling Perl on AmigaOS | |
| =over 6 | |
| =item B<Unix emulation for AmigaOS: ixemul.library> | |
| You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most important part is | |
| B<ixemul.library>. For a minimum setup, get the latest versions | |
| of the following packages from the Aminet archives | |
| ( L<http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/> ): | |
| ixemul-bin | |
| ixemul-env-bin | |
| pdksh-bin | |
| Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might want to add other | |
| packages of B<ADE> (the I<Amiga Developers Environment>). | |
| =item B<Version of Amiga OS> | |
| You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Recommended is version 3.1. | |
| =back | |
| =head2 Starting Perl programs under AmigaOS | |
| Start your Perl program F<foo> with arguments C<arg1 arg2 arg3> the | |
| same way as on any other platform, by | |
| perl foo arg1 arg2 arg3 | |
| If you want to specify perl options C<-my_opts> to the perl itself (as | |
| opposed to your program), use | |
| perl -my_opts foo arg1 arg2 arg3 | |
| Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the system's B<Execute> | |
| command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syntax in scripts and set the s-Bit | |
| of your scripts. Then you can invoke your scripts like under UNIX with | |
| foo arg1 arg2 arg3 | |
| (Note that having *nixish full path to perl F</usr/bin/perl> is not | |
| necessary, F<perl> would be enough, but having full path would make it | |
| easier to use your script under *nix.) | |
| =head2 Shortcomings of Perl under AmigaOS | |
| Perl under AmigaOS lacks some features of perl under UNIX because of | |
| deficiencies in the UNIX-emulation, most notably: | |
| =over 6 | |
| =item * | |
| fork() | |
| =item * | |
| some features of the UNIX filesystem regarding link count and file dates | |
| =item * | |
| inplace operation (the -i switch) without backup file | |
| =item * | |
| umask() works, but the correct permissions are only set when the file is | |
| finally close()d | |
| =back | |
| =head1 INSTALLATION | |
| Change to the installation directory (most probably ADE:), and | |
| extract the binary distribution: | |
| lha -mraxe x perl-$VERSION-bin.lha | |
| or | |
| tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-bin.tgz | |
| (Of course you need lha or tar and gunzip for this.) | |
| For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropriate docs. | |
| =head1 Accessing documentation | |
| =head2 Manpages for Perl on AmigaOS | |
| If you have C<man> installed on your system, and you installed perl | |
| manpages, use something like this: | |
| man perlfunc | |
| man less | |
| man ExtUtils.MakeMaker | |
| to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with | |
| man perl | |
| Note: You have to modify your man.conf file to search for manpages | |
| in the /ade/lib/perl5/man/man3 directory, or the man pages for the | |
| perl library will not be found. | |
| Note that dot (F<.>) is used as a package separator for documentation | |
| for packages, and as usual, sometimes you need to give the section - C<3> | |
| above - to avoid shadowing by the I<less(1) manpage>. | |
| =head2 Perl HTML Documentation on AmigaOS | |
| If you have some WWW browser available, you can build B<HTML> docs. | |
| Cd to directory with F<.pod> files, and do like this | |
| cd /ade/lib/perl5/pod | |
| pod2html | |
| After this you can direct your browser the file F<perl.html> in this | |
| directory, and go ahead with reading docs. | |
| Alternatively you may be able to get these docs prebuilt from C<CPAN>. | |
| =head2 Perl GNU Info Files on AmigaOS | |
| Users of C<Emacs> would appreciate it very much, especially with | |
| C<CPerl> mode loaded. You need to get latest C<pod2info> from C<CPAN>, | |
| or, alternately, prebuilt info pages. | |
| =head2 Perl LaTeX Documentation on AmigaOS | |
| Can be constructed using C<pod2latex>. | |
| =head1 BUILDING PERL ON AMIGAOS | |
| Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS. | |
| =head2 Build Prerequisites for Perl on AmigaOS | |
| You need to have the latest B<ixemul> (Unix emulation for Amiga) | |
| from Aminet. | |
| =head2 Getting the Perl Source for AmigaOS | |
| You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from Ninemoons | |
| and extract it with: | |
| tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-src.tgz | |
| or get the official source from CPAN: | |
| http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0 | |
| Extract it like this | |
| tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION.tar.gz | |
| You will see a message about errors while extracting F<Configure>. This | |
| is normal and expected. (There is a conflict with a similarly-named file | |
| F<configure>, but it causes no harm.) | |
| =head2 Making Perl on AmigaOS | |
| Remember to use a hefty wad of stack (I use 2000000) | |
| sh configure.gnu --prefix=/gg | |
| Now type | |
| make depend | |
| Now! | |
| make | |
| =head2 Testing Perl on AmigaOS | |
| Now run | |
| make test | |
| Some tests will be skipped because they need the fork() function: | |
| F<io/pipe.t>, F<op/fork.t>, F<lib/filehand.t>, F<lib/open2.t>, F<lib/open3.t>, | |
| F<lib/io_pipe.t>, F<lib/io_sock.t> | |
| =head2 Installing the built Perl on AmigaOS | |
| Run | |
| make install | |
| =head1 PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS | |
| As told above, Perl 5.6.1 was still good in AmigaOS, as was 5.7.2. | |
| After Perl 5.7.2 (change #11423, see the Changes file, and the file | |
| pod/perlhack.pod for how to get the individual changes) Perl dropped | |
| its internal support for vfork(), and that was very probably the step | |
| that broke AmigaOS (since the ixemul library has only vfork). | |
| The build finally fails when the ext/DynaLoader is being built, and | |
| PERL ends up as "0" in the produced Makefile, trying to run "0" does | |
| not quite work. Also, executing miniperl in backticks seems to | |
| generate nothing: very probably related to the (v)fork problems. | |
| B<Fixing the breakage requires someone quite familiar with the ixemul | |
| library, and how one is supposed to run external commands in AmigaOS | |
| without fork().> | |
| =head1 AUTHORS | |
| Norbert Pueschel, pueschel@imsdd.meb.uni-bonn.de | |
| Jan-Erik Karlsson, trg@privat.utfors.se | |
| =head1 SEE ALSO | |
| perl(1). | |
| =cut |