[9fans] porting more recent Perl to Plan9

[Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@iki.fi>]

Hi,

I'm the current Perl development lead.  Currently we are in the
process of getting perl 5.8.0 released, but to my chagrin I noticed
that our Plan 9 port is a bit outdated.

I'd like to rectify this situation.

Luther Huffman made a port of perl 5.003_07, but that was six years
ago...  From googling around I can see that at least Peter A. Cejchan
(pac@cejchan.gli.cas.cz) has succesfully compiled Perl 5.004_05
(getting better, only three years old release).  Since then there
have been two major release (5.005 and 5.6) (we changed numbering
scheme).  The 5.8 will be the next major release.

I have in the past tried to reach Luther a couple of time but without
luck.  I already sent also private email to Peter, since his was the
latest message about success with Perl in Plan 9.

What needs to be done is that someone who knows Plan 9 grabs
a developer snapshot of Perl from

	ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/snap/

(the latest perl@NNNNN.tgz) and starts hacking on it, using Luther's
guidance in perl/README.plan9.  Where I can help is answering what
does Perl want to do and why.

 From glaring the plan9/* files I can see at least least two things
that need to be done: (1) the list of cpp symbols that define which C
APIs Perl tries to use needs to be updated since so many releases have
passed (2) the list of extensions Perl is going to build should be
grown (e.g. the Encode extension which does Unicode conversions is an
essential part of Perl 5.8.0)

How hard will be bridging the gap of several releases, I don't know.
But if I'm being realistic I don't really expect us to get this done
by the 5.8.0 release (which, hopefully, is not too many weeks away).
But at least we can start the work now, so maybe in 5.8.1.

P.S.  I suggest a rather fast CPU for compilation: Perl has grown
quite a bit, it's more like a language plus a SDK these days.

--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
        # There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
        # It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen