Re: Experience installing on Alpha VMS 8.3

On Feb 15, 2021, at 5:07 PM, Miller, Edward S. via vmsperl =
<[email protected]> wrote:
>=20
> We have recently installed PERL v5.32.1 on our Alpha VMS 8.3 system =
using the distribution from PERL.ORG.
> The README.VMS suggests that:
>    "Regardless of how confident you are, make a bug report to the =
VMSPerl mailing list."

Thanks for the report.  Haven't had many lately.

> This is not really a complete bug report, but more a summary of my =
experience doing the install
> and an attempt to find out whether anyone is really interested in a =
more specific 'bug report'.
>=20
> As far as we can tell, the install for us was successful.  Our user =
who reported that his code would not
> work with our old perl version (5.004_04) reports that it now works =
with the newly installed v5.32.1.

Wow. 5.004_04 was from 1997, so that's a big jump.

> I have one change to the readme.vms I would strongly suggest:  state =
unequivocally that the install procedures should
> be done using an ODS-5 disk, and that you are (very likely?) wasting =
your time attempting it on an ODS-2 disk.
> (In our case the first MMK operation failed eventually--in two =
different ways, with two different MMK versions--
> using an ODS-2 disk.)

Fair enough.  Things go from possible to not recommended to just won't =
work and the docs don't always keep up.  README.vms does say the =
following:

------
ODS-5 and Extended Parse

All development and testing of Perl on VMS takes place on ODS-5 volumes =
with
extended parse enabled in the environment via the command C<SET =
PROCESS/PARSE=3DEXTENDED>.
Latent support for ODS-2 volumes (including on VAX) is still present, =
but the number
of components that require ODS-5 features is steadily growing and ODS-2 =
support may be
completely removed in a future release.
------

That's not strictly true anymore either as VAX support is long gone.  So =
yes, there are some documentation updates needed.


> The step   @configure "-des" was apparently successful (assuming the =
many "NOT found" messages are benign).

It will find more things on v8.4 than v8.3 (which is now a pretty old =
release) and even more things on v8.4-2 with the C99 patch applied.  =
It's normal to have some things not found.

> The first "MMK" step had several "%CC-I" compiler messages, the most =
suspicious of which was
>=20
>                 neg =3D PL_statcache.st_ino < 0;
>      ..................^
>     %CC-I-QUESTCOMPARE, In this statement, the unsigned expression =
"PL_statcache.st_ino" is being compared with a relational
>     operator to a constant whose value is not greater than zero.  This =
might not be what you intended.
>     at line number 2949 in file =
DISK$ORACLE5:[PERL.perl-5^.32^.1]pp_sys.c;1

That line of code is guarded like so:

            CLANG_DIAG_IGNORE_STMT(-Wtautological-compare);
            GCC_DIAG_IGNORE_STMT(-Wtype-limits);
            neg =3D PL_statcache.st_ino < 0;
            GCC_DIAG_RESTORE_STMT;
            CLANG_DIAG_RESTORE_STMT;

We could add equivalent pragmas to make the VMS C compiler ignore it as =
well but I question whether it's worth 10 lines of code to negate a =
warning on one line of code.  The author of that line insists that it's =
idiomatic C and there's nothing wrong with it.

>=20
> The step "MMK test" completed and summarized its results with
>    "Failed 58 tests out of 2350, 97.53% okay."
>=20
>    I ran the procedure to get details of some of these failures using
>        $ @[.vms]test .EXE "" -"v"  (filespec)
>    However I was successful in getting the proper syntax for =
(filespec) only for those that were originally
>    reported as FAILED with a file specification that started with =
"t/", not the others.

58 failures is on the high side but as I said, VMS v8.3 is pretty old =
and I haven't built on it in years.  It's problematic that the test =
driver doesn't work for tests outside of the [.t] directory.  If you =
give me an example it's possible I could spot a way to run it.

> The step "MMK install" was apparently successful (assuming the many =
"Can't cd to (cpan/IO-Compress/)  xxx.tmp:  no such file or directory"
> messages are benign).

I believe they are benign as far as getting things installed.  There is =
a bug in something IO::Compress uses (I think it's File::Temp) that =
causes the warning but it doesn't seem to prevent it from working.

>=20
> A thanks to all of those who contributed to making PERL functional on =
VMS systems.
>=20
>   -- Ed Miller  SLAC NAL.

________________________________________
Craig A. Berry

"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
 difficult than getting in."
                 Brad Leithauser