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=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
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