Edit File: perlamiga.pod
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