From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jarkko Hietaniemi To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Message-ID: <20020609032236.I24232@alpha.hut.fi> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5.1i Subject: [9fans] porting more recent Perl to Plan9 Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2002 03:22:36 +0300 Topicbox-Message-UUID: a7ac2eaa-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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we are in the process of getting perl 5.8.0 released, but to my chagrin I noticed that our Plan 9 port is a bit outdated.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