Perl 5.7.0

Perl 5.7.0 is a "development" release, and does have some excellent VMS compatibility. It is, however, very much a "work in progress". On this page I've captured a snapshot of a recent (perl@8269; 30 Dec 2000) Perl 5.7.0, built it on an Alpha running VMS 6.2-1H3, and am making the binary available.

Please be aware that if you want to use this Perl with CRINOID, you should use CRINOID 0.52-4 or more recent; there are some changes in how Safe partitions handle %INC that break the earlier CRINOID's handling of resetting CGI.pm symbols on reusable scripts.

Here's a Zipfile via HTTP of the resulting build (also via FTP). Full sources and OBJs are included.

This build was done with DECC 5.5-02 and default options selected for CONFIGURE.COM (in particular, networking is "DECC").

Only one minor patch had been applied, to get the Encode extension to build properly. The Perl test suite ran and passed all tests.

After downloading and expanding the Zipfile, you will have to edit the PERL_SETUP.COM to point PERL_ROOT to the correct directory on your system.

I've already loaded up this Perl with some modules and a working (works for me, hope it does for you too!) CPAN.pm. The list of modules.

Setting up CPAN: Utilities

Normally, one would have to configure CPAN.pm extensively to tell it where your copy of GZIP, etc. are located.

I decided to make things a bit easier. I set up CPAN.pm to use PERL_ROOT:[CPAN] as its "cache area", and in PERL_ROOT:[CPAN.UTILS] you'll find binary executables for GZIP (with the i/o redirection fix), VMSTAR, UNZIP, and MMK (3.8-1 with the implicit dependancy fix). CPAN.pm is configured to use these programs by default, but you can easily change them.

You might also find these utilities useful even without CPAN.pm.

This file was last modified on Wed Jan 3 17:16:56 2001 by lane@duphy4.physics.drexel.edu