1 Notes on Perl on the Hurd
2 Last Updated: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 16:07:59 +0100
3 Written by: Mark Kettenis <kettenis@gnu.org>
5 If you want to use Perl on the Hurd, I recommend using the Debian
6 GNU/Hurd distribution (see http://www.debian.org), even if an
7 official, stable release has not yet been made. The old `gnu-0.2'
8 binary distribution will most certainly have additional problems.
12 The Perl testsuite may still report some errors on the Hurd. The
13 `lib/anydbm.t' and `op/stat.t' tests will most certainly fail. The
14 first fails because Berkeley DB 2 does not allow empty keys and the
15 test tries to use them anyway. This is not really a Hurd bug. The
16 same test fails on Linux with version 2.1 of the GNU C Library. The
17 second failure is caused by a bug in the Hurd's filesystem servers,
18 that we have not been able to fix yet. I don't think it is crucial.
20 The socket tests may fail if the network is not configured. You have
21 to make `/hurd/pfinet' the translator for `/servers/socket/2', giving
22 it the right arguments. Try `/hurd/pfinet --help' for more
25 Here are the statistics for Perl 5.005_03 on my system:
27 Failed Test Status Wstat Total Fail Failed List of failed
28 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
29 lib/anydbm.t 12 1 8.33% 12
30 op/stat.t 58 1 1.72% 4
31 5 tests skipped, plus 14 subtests skipped.
32 Failed 2/189 test scripts, 98.94% okay. 2/6669 subtests failed, 99.97% okay.
34 There are quite a few systems out there that do worse!
36 However, since I am running a very recent Hurd snapshot, in which a lot of
37 bugs that were exposed by the Perl testsuite have been fixed, you may
38 encounter more failures. Likely candidates are: `lib/io_pipe.t',
39 `lib/io_sock.t', `lib/io_udp.t' and `lib/time.t'.