=head1 NAME
Install - Build and Installation guide for perl5.
=head1 SYNOPSIS
First, make sure you are installing an up-to-date version of Perl. If
you didn't get your Perl source from CPAN, check the latest version at
.
The basic steps to build and install perl5 on a Unix system
with all the defaults are:
rm -f config.sh Policy.sh
sh Configure -de
make
make test
make install
# You may also wish to add these:
(cd /usr/include && h2ph *.h sys/*.h)
(installhtml --help)
(cd pod && make tex && )
Each of these is explained in further detail below.
B: starting from the release 5.6.0, Perl uses a version
scheme where even-numbered subreleases (like 5.6 and 5.8) are stable
maintenance releases and odd-numbered subreleases (like 5.7) are
unstable development releases. Development releases should not be
used in production environments. Fixes and new features are first
carefully tested in development releases and only if they prove
themselves to be worthy will they be migrated to the maintenance
releases.
The above commands will install Perl to /usr/local (or some other
platform-specific directory -- see the appropriate file in hints/.)
If that's not okay with you, use
rm -f config.sh Policy.sh
sh Configure
make
make test
make install
For information on non-Unix systems, see the section on L<"Porting
information"> below.
If "make install" just says "`install' is up to date" or something
similar, you may be on a case-insensitive filesystems such as Mac's HFS+,
and you should say "make install-all". (This confusion is brought to you
by the Perl distribution having a file called INSTALL.)
If you have problems, corrections, or questions, please see
L<"Reporting Problems"> below.
For information on what's new in this release, see the
pod/perldelta.pod file. For more detailed information about specific
changes, see the Changes file.
=head1 DESCRIPTION
This document is written in pod format as an easy way to indicate its
structure. The pod format is described in pod/perlpod.pod, but you can
read it as is with any pager or editor. Headings and items are marked
by lines beginning with '='. The other mark-up used is
B embolden text, used for switches, programs or commands
C literal code
L A link (cross reference) to name
Although most of the defaults are probably fine for most users,
you should probably at least skim through this entire document before
proceeding.
If you're building Perl on a non-Unix system, you should also read
the README file specific to your operating system, since this may
provide additional or different instructions for building Perl. There
are also README files for several flavors of Unix systems, such as
Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX; if you have one of those systems, you should
also read the README file specific to that system.
If there is a hint file for your system (in the hints/ directory) you
should also read that hint file for specific information for your
system. (Unixware users should use the svr4.sh hint file.)
Additional information is in the Porting/ directory.
=head1 WARNING: This version requires an extra step to build old extensions.
5.005_53 and later releases do not export unadorned
global symbols anymore. This means you may need to build rather old
extensions that have not been updated for the current naming convention
with:
perl Makefile.PL POLLUTE=1
Alternatively, you can enable CPP symbol pollution wholesale by
building perl itself with:
sh Configure -Accflags=-DPERL_POLLUTE
pod/perl56delta.pod contains more details about this.
=head1 WARNING: This version is not binary compatible with releases of
Perl prior to 5.8.0.
If you have built extensions (i.e. modules that include C code)
using an earlier version of Perl, you will need to rebuild and reinstall
those extensions.
Pure perl modules without XS or C code should continue to work fine
without reinstallation. See the discussions below on
L<"Coexistence with earlier versions of perl5"> and
L<"Upgrading from 5.005 or 5.6 to 5.8.0"> for more details.
The standard extensions supplied with Perl will be handled automatically.
On a related issue, old modules may possibly be affected by the
changes in the Perl language in the current release. Please see
pod/perldelta.pod (and the earlier pod/perl5Xdelta.pod) for a description of
what's changed. See your installed copy of the perllocal.pod
file for a (possibly incomplete) list of locally installed modules.
Also see CPAN::autobundle for one way to make a "bundle" of your
currently installed modules.
=head1 WARNING: This version requires a compiler that supports ANSI C.
Most C compilers are now ANSI-compliant. However, a few current
computers are delivered with an older C compiler expressly for
rebuilding the system kernel, or for some other historical reason.
Alternatively, you may have an old machine which was shipped before
ANSI compliance became widespread. Such compilers are not suitable
for building Perl.
If you find that your default C compiler is not ANSI-capable, but you
know that an ANSI-capable compiler is installed on your system, you
can tell F to use the correct compiler by means of the
C<-Dcc=> command-line option -- see L<"gcc">.
If do not have an ANSI-capable compiler there are a couple of avenues
open to you:
=over 4
=item *
You may try obtaining GCC, available from GNU mirrors worldwide,
listed at . If, rather than
building gcc from source code, you locate a binary version configured
for your platform, be sure that it is compiled for the version of the
operating system that you are using.
=item *
You may purchase a commercial ANSI C compiler from your system
supplier or elsewhere. (Or your organization may already have
licensed such software -- ask your colleagues to find out how to
access it.) If there is a README file for your system in the Perl
distribution (for example, F), it may contain advice on
suitable compilers.
=back
Although Perl can be compiled using a C++ compiler, the Configure script
does not work with some C++ compilers.
=head1 Space Requirements
The complete perl5 source tree takes up about 50 MB of disk space.
After completing make, it takes up roughly 100 MB, though the actual
total is likely to be quite system-dependent. The installation
directories need something on the order of 45 MB, though again that
value is system-dependent.
=head1 Start with a Fresh Distribution
If you have built perl before, you should clean out the build directory
with the command
make distclean
or
make realclean
The only difference between the two is that make distclean also removes
your old config.sh and Policy.sh files.
The results of a Configure run are stored in the config.sh and Policy.sh
files. If you are upgrading from a previous version of perl, or if you
change systems or compilers or make other significant changes, or if
you are experiencing difficulties building perl, you should probably
not re-use your old config.sh. Simply remove it
rm -f config.sh
If you wish to use your old config.sh, be especially attentive to the
version and architecture-specific questions and answers. For example,
the default directory for architecture-dependent library modules
includes the version name. By default, Configure will reuse your old
name (e.g. /opt/perl/lib/i86pc-solaris/5.003) even if you're running
Configure for a different version, e.g. 5.004. Yes, Configure should
probably check and correct for this, but it doesn't.
Similarly, if you used a shared libperl.so (see below) with version
numbers, you will probably want to adjust them as well.
Also, be careful to check your architecture name. For example, some
Linux distributions use i386, while others may use i486. If you build
it yourself, Configure uses the output of the arch command, which
might be i586 or i686 instead. If you pick up a precompiled binary, or
compile extensions on different systems, they might not all agree on
the architecture name.
In short, if you wish to use your old config.sh, I recommend running
Configure interactively rather than blindly accepting the defaults.
If your reason to reuse your old config.sh is to save your particular
installation choices, then you can probably achieve the same effect by
using the Policy.sh file. See the section on L<"Site-wide Policy
settings"> below. If you wish to start with a fresh distribution, you
also need to remove any old Policy.sh files you may have with
rm -f Policy.sh
=head1 Run Configure
Configure will figure out various things about your system. Some
things Configure will figure out for itself, other things it will ask
you about. To accept the default, just press RETURN. The default is
almost always okay. It is normal for some things to be "NOT found",
since Configure often searches for many different ways of performing
the same function.
At any Configure prompt, you can type &-d and Configure will use the
defaults from then on.
After it runs, Configure will perform variable substitution on all the
*.SH files and offer to run make depend.
=head2 Altering config.sh variables for C compiler switches etc.
For most users, all of the Configure defaults are fine. Configure
also has several convenient options which are described below.
However, if Configure doesn't have an option to do what you want,
you can change Configure variables after the platform hints have been
run, by using Configure's -A switch. For example, here's how to add
a couple of extra flags to C compiler invocations:
sh Configure -Accflags="-DPERL_Y2KWARN -DPERL_POLLUTE_MALLOC"
For more help on Configure switches, run:
sh Configure -h
=head2 Building Perl outside of the source directory
Sometimes it is desirable to build Perl in a directory different from
where the sources are, for example if you want to keep your sources
read-only, or if you want to share the sources between different binary
architectures. You can do this (if your file system supports symbolic
links) by
mkdir /tmp/perl/build/directory
cd /tmp/perl/build/directory
sh /path/to/perl/source/Configure -Dmksymlinks ...
This will create in /tmp/perl/build/directory a tree of symbolic links
pointing to files in /path/to/perl/source. The original files are left
unaffected. After Configure has finished you can just say
make all test
and Perl will be built and tested, all in /tmp/perl/build/directory.
=head2 Common Configure options
Configure supports a number of useful options. Run B to
get a listing. See the Porting/Glossary file for a complete list of
Configure variables you can set and their definitions.
=over 4
=item gcc
To compile with gcc you should run
sh Configure -Dcc=gcc
This is the preferred way to specify gcc (or another alternative
compiler) so that the hints files can set appropriate defaults.
=item Installation prefix
By default, for most systems, perl will be installed in
/usr/local/{bin, lib, man}. (See L<"Installation Directories">
and L<"Coexistence with earlier versions of perl5"> below for
further details.)
You can specify a different 'prefix' for the default installation
directory, when Configure prompts you or by using the Configure command
line option -Dprefix='/some/directory', e.g.
sh Configure -Dprefix=/opt/perl
If your prefix contains the string "perl", then the suggested
directory structure is simplified. For example, if you use
prefix=/opt/perl, then Configure will suggest /opt/perl/lib instead of
/opt/perl/lib/perl5/. Again, see L<"Installation Directories"> below
for more details. Do not include a trailing slash, (i.e. /opt/perl/)
or you may experience odd test failures.
NOTE: You must not specify an installation directory that is the same
as or below your perl source directory. If you do, installperl will
attempt infinite recursion.
=item /usr/bin/perl
It may seem obvious, but Perl is useful only when users can easily
find it. It's often a good idea to have both /usr/bin/perl and
/usr/local/bin/perl be symlinks to the actual binary. Be especially
careful, however, not to overwrite a version of perl supplied by your
vendor unless you are sure you know what you are doing.
By default, Configure will arrange for /usr/bin/perl to be linked to
the current version of perl. You can turn off that behavior by running
Configure -Uinstallusrbinperl
or by answering 'no' to the appropriate Configure prompt.
In any case, system administrators are strongly encouraged to
put (symlinks to) perl and its accompanying utilities, such as perldoc,
into a directory typically found along a user's PATH, or in another
obvious and convenient place.
=item Overriding an old config.sh
If you want to use your old config.sh but override some of the items
with command line options, you need to use B.
=back
If you are willing to accept all the defaults, and you want terse
output, you can run
sh Configure -des
Note: for development releases (odd subreleases, like 5.9, as opposed
to maintenance releases which have even subreleases, like 5.6 and 5.8)
if you want to use Configure -d, you will also need to supply -Dusedevel
to Configure, because the default answer to the question "do you really
want to Configure a development version?" is "no". The -Dusedevel
skips that sanity check.
For example for my Solaris system, I usually use
sh Configure -Dprefix=/opt/perl -Doptimize='-xpentium -xO4' -des
=head2 GNU-style configure
If you prefer the GNU-style configure command line interface, you can
use the supplied configure.gnu command, e.g.
CC=gcc ./configure.gnu
The configure.gnu script emulates a few of the more common configure
options. Try
./configure.gnu --help
for a listing.
(The file is called configure.gnu to avoid problems on systems
that would not distinguish the files "Configure" and "configure".)
See L below for information on cross-compiling.
=head2 Installation Directories
The installation directories can all be changed by answering the
appropriate questions in Configure. For convenience, all the
installation questions are near the beginning of Configure.
Do not include trailing slashes on directory names.
I highly recommend running Configure interactively to be sure it puts
everything where you want it. At any point during the Configure
process, you can answer a question with &-d and Configure will use
the defaults from then on. Alternatively, you can
grep '^install' config.sh
after Configure has run to verify the installation paths.
The defaults are intended to be reasonable and sensible for most
people building from sources. Those who build and distribute binary
distributions or who export perl to a range of systems will probably
need to alter them. If you are content to just accept the defaults,
you can safely skip the next section.
The directories set up by Configure fall into three broad categories.
=over 4
=item Directories for the perl distribution
By default, Configure will use the following directories for 5.8.0.
$version is the full perl version number, including subversion, e.g.
5.8.0 or 5.8.1, and $archname is a string like sun4-sunos,
determined by Configure. The full definitions of all Configure
variables are in the file Porting/Glossary.
Configure variable Default value
$prefix /usr/local
$bin $prefix/bin
$scriptdir $prefix/bin
$privlib $prefix/lib/perl5/$version
$archlib $prefix/lib/perl5/$version/$archname
$man1dir $prefix/man/man1
$man3dir $prefix/man/man3
$html1dir (none)
$html3dir (none)
Actually, Configure recognizes the SVR3-style
/usr/local/man/l_man/man1 directories, if present, and uses those
instead. Also, if $prefix contains the string "perl", the library
directories are simplified as described below. For simplicity, only
the common style is shown here.
=item Directories for site-specific add-on files
After perl is installed, you may later wish to add modules (e.g. from
CPAN) or scripts. Configure will set up the following directories to
be used for installing those add-on modules and scripts.
Configure variable Default value
$siteprefix $prefix
$sitebin $siteprefix/bin
$sitescript $siteprefix/bin
$sitelib $siteprefix/lib/perl5/site_perl/$version
$sitearch $siteprefix/lib/perl5/site_perl/$version/$archname
$siteman1dir $siteprefix/man/man1
$siteman3dir $siteprefix/man/man3
$sitehtml1dir (none)
$sitehtml3dir (none)
By default, ExtUtils::MakeMaker will install architecture-independent
modules into $sitelib and architecture-dependent modules into $sitearch.
=item Directories for vendor-supplied add-on files
Lastly, if you are building a binary distribution of perl for
distribution, Configure can optionally set up the following directories
for you to use to distribute add-on modules.
Configure variable Default value
$vendorprefix (none)
(The next ones are set only if vendorprefix is set.)
$vendorbin $vendorprefix/bin
$vendorscript $vendorprefix/bin
$vendorlib $vendorprefix/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/$version
$vendorarch $vendorprefix/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/$version/$archname
$vendorman1dir $vendorprefix/man/man1
$vendorman3dir $vendorprefix/man/man3
$vendorhtml1dir (none)
$vendorhtml3dir (none)
These are normally empty, but may be set as needed. For example,
a vendor might choose the following settings:
$prefix /usr
$siteprefix /usr/local
$vendorprefix /usr
This would have the effect of setting the following:
$bin /usr/bin
$scriptdir /usr/bin
$privlib /usr/lib/perl5/$version
$archlib /usr/lib/perl5/$version/$archname
$man1dir /usr/man/man1
$man3dir /usr/man/man3
$sitebin /usr/local/bin
$sitescript /usr/local/bin
$sitelib /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/$version
$sitearch /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/$version/$archname
$siteman1dir /usr/local/man/man1
$siteman3dir /usr/local/man/man3
$vendorbin /usr/bin
$vendorscript /usr/bin
$vendorlib /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/$version
$vendorarch /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/$version/$archname
$vendorman1dir /usr/man/man1
$vendorman3dir /usr/man/man3
Note how in this example, the vendor-supplied directories are in the
/usr hierarchy, while the directories reserved for the end-user are in
the /usr/local hierarchy.
The entire installed library hierarchy is installed in locations with
version numbers, keeping the installations of different versions distinct.
However, later installations of Perl can still be configured to search the
installed libraries corresponding to compatible earlier versions.
See L<"Coexistence with earlier versions of perl5"> below for more details
on how Perl can be made to search older version directories.
Of course you may use these directories however you see fit. For
example, you may wish to use $siteprefix for site-specific files that
are stored locally on your own disk and use $vendorprefix for
site-specific files that are stored elsewhere on your organization's
network. One way to do that would be something like
sh Configure -Dsiteprefix=/usr/local -Dvendorprefix=/usr/share/perl
=item otherlibdirs
As a final catch-all, Configure also offers an $otherlibdirs
variable. This variable contains a colon-separated list of additional
directories to add to @INC. By default, it will be empty.
Perl will search these directories (including architecture and
version-specific subdirectories) for add-on modules and extensions.
For example, if you have a bundle of perl libraries from a previous
installation, perhaps in a strange place:
Configure -Dotherlibdirs=/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1
=item APPLLIB_EXP
There is one other way of adding paths to @INC at perl build time, and
that is by setting the APPLLIB_EXP C pre-processor token to a colon-
separated list of directories, like this
sh Configure -Accflags='-DAPPLLIB_EXP=\"/usr/libperl\"'
The directories defined by APPLLIB_EXP get added to @INC I,
ahead of any others, and so provide a way to override the standard perl
modules should you, for example, want to distribute fixes without
touching the perl distribution proper. And, like otherlib dirs,
version and architecture specific subdirectories are also searched, if
present, at run time. Of course, you can still search other @INC
directories ahead of those in APPLLIB_EXP by using any of the standard
run-time methods: $PERLLIB, $PERL5LIB, -I, use lib, etc.
=item Man Pages
In versions 5.005_57 and earlier, the default was to store module man
pages in a version-specific directory, such as
/usr/local/lib/perl5/$version/man/man3. The default for 5.005_58 and
after is /usr/local/man/man3 so that most users can find the man pages
without resetting MANPATH.
You can continue to use the old default from the command line with
sh Configure -Dman3dir=/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.0/man/man3
Some users also prefer to use a .3pm suffix. You can do that with
sh Configure -Dman3ext=3pm
Again, these are just the defaults, and can be changed as you run
Configure.
=item HTML pages
Currently, the standard perl installation does not do anything with
HTML documentation, but that may change in the future. Further, some
add-on modules may wish to install HTML documents. The html Configure
variables listed above are provided if you wish to specify where such
documents should be placed. The default is "none", but will likely
eventually change to something useful based on user feedback.
=back
Some users prefer to append a "/share" to $privlib and $sitelib
to emphasize that those directories can be shared among different
architectures.
Note that these are just the defaults. You can actually structure the
directories any way you like. They don't even have to be on the same
filesystem.
Further details about the installation directories, maintenance and
development subversions, and about supporting multiple versions are
discussed in L<"Coexistence with earlier versions of perl5"> below.
If you specify a prefix that contains the string "perl", then the
library directory structure is slightly simplified. Instead of
suggesting $prefix/lib/perl5/, Configure will suggest $prefix/lib.
Thus, for example, if you Configure with
-Dprefix=/opt/perl, then the default library directories for 5.8.0 are
Configure variable Default value
$privlib /opt/perl/lib/5.8.0
$archlib /opt/perl/lib/5.8.0/$archname
$sitelib /opt/perl/lib/site_perl/5.8.0
$sitearch /opt/perl/lib/site_perl/5.8.0/$archname
=head2 Changing the installation directory
Configure distinguishes between the directory in which perl (and its
associated files) should be installed and the directory in which it
will eventually reside. For most sites, these two are the same; for
sites that use AFS, this distinction is handled automatically.
However, sites that use software such as depot to manage software
packages, or users building binary packages for distribution may also
wish to install perl into a different directory and use that
management software to move perl to its final destination. This
section describes how to do that.
Suppose you want to install perl under the /tmp/perl5 directory. You
could edit config.sh and change all the install* variables to point to
/tmp/perl5 instead of /usr/local, or you could simply use the
following command line:
sh Configure -Dinstallprefix=/tmp/perl5
(replace /tmp/perl5 by a directory of your choice).
Beware, though, that if you go to try to install new add-on
modules, they too will get installed in under '/tmp/perl5' if you
follow this example. The next section shows one way of dealing with
that problem.
=head2 Creating an installable tar archive
If you need to install perl on many identical systems, it is
convenient to compile it once and create an archive that can be
installed on multiple systems. Suppose, for example, that you want to
create an archive that can be installed in /opt/perl.
Here's one way to do that:
# Set up to install perl into a different directory,
# e.g. /tmp/perl5 (see previous part).
sh Configure -Dinstallprefix=/tmp/perl5 -Dprefix=/opt/perl -des
make
make test
make install # This will install everything into /tmp/perl5.
cd /tmp/perl5
# Edit $archlib/Config.pm and $archlib/.packlist to change all the
# install* variables back to reflect where everything will
# really be installed. (That is, change /tmp/perl5 to /opt/perl
# everywhere in those files.)
# Check the scripts in $scriptdir to make sure they have the correct
# #!/wherever/perl line.
tar cvf ../perl5-archive.tar .
# Then, on each machine where you want to install perl,
cd /opt/perl # Or wherever you specified as $prefix
tar xvf perl5-archive.tar
=head2 Site-wide Policy settings
After Configure runs, it stores a number of common site-wide "policy"
answers (such as installation directories and the local perl contact
person) in the Policy.sh file. If you want to build perl on another
system using the same policy defaults, simply copy the Policy.sh file
to the new system and Configure will use it along with the appropriate
hint file for your system.
Alternatively, if you wish to change some or all of those policy
answers, you should
rm -f Policy.sh
to ensure that Configure doesn't re-use them.
Further information is in the Policy_sh.SH file itself.
If the generated Policy.sh file is unsuitable, you may freely edit it
to contain any valid shell commands. It will be run just after the
platform-specific hints files.
=head2 Configure-time Options
There are several different ways to Configure and build perl for your
system. For most users, the defaults are sensible and will work.
Some users, however, may wish to further customize perl. Here are
some of the main things you can change.
=head2 Threads
On some platforms, perl can be compiled with
support for threads. To enable this, run
sh Configure -Dusethreads
Currently, you need to specify -Dusethreads on the Configure command
line so that the hint files can make appropriate adjustments.
The default is to compile without thread support.
Perl has two different internal threads implementations. The current
model (available internally since 5.6, and as a user-level module
since 5.8) is called interpreter-based implementation (ithreads),
with one interpreter per thread, and explicit sharing of data.
The 5.005 version (5005threads) is considered obsolete, buggy, and
unmaintained.
By default, Configure selects ithreads if -Dusethreads is specified.
(You need to also use the PerlIO layer, explained later, if you decide
to use ithreads, to guarantee the good interworking of threads and I/O.)
However, if you wish, you can select the unsupported old 5005threads behavior
sh Configure -Dusethreads -Duse5005threads
If you decide to use ithreads, the 'threads' module allows their use,
and the 'Thread' module offers an interface to both 5005threads and
ithreads (whichever has been configured).
When building threaded for certain library calls like the getgr*() and
the getpw*() there is a dynamically sized result buffer: the buffer
starts small but Perl will keep growing the buffer until the result fits.
To get a fixed upper limit you will have to recompile Perl with
PERL_REENTRANT_MAXSIZE defined to be the number of bytes you want.
One way to do this is to run Configure with
C<-Accflags=-DPERL_REENTRANT_MAXSIZE=65536>
=head2 Large file support.
Since Perl 5.6.0, Perl has supported large files (files larger than
2 gigabytes), and in many common platforms like Linux or Solaris this
support is on by default.
This is both good and bad. It is good in that you can use large files,
seek(), stat(), and -s them. It is bad in that if you are interfacing Perl
using some extension, the components you are connecting to must also
be large file aware: if Perl thinks files can be large but the other
parts of the software puzzle do not understand the concept, bad things
will happen. One popular extension suffering from this ailment is the
Apache extension mod_perl.
There's also one known limitation with the current large files
implementation: unless you also have 64-bit integers (see the next
section), you cannot use the printf/sprintf non-decimal integer
formats like C<%x> to print filesizes. You can use C<%d>, though.
=head2 64 bit support.
If your platform does not have 64 bits natively, but can simulate them
with compiler flags and/or C or C, you can build a
perl that uses 64 bits.
There are actually two modes of 64-bitness: the first one is achieved
using Configure -Duse64bitint and the second one using Configure
-Duse64bitall. The difference is that the first one is minimal and
the second one maximal. The first works in more places than the second.
The C does only as much as is required to get 64-bit
integers into Perl (this may mean, for example, using "long longs")
while your memory may still be limited to 2 gigabytes (because your
pointers could still be 32-bit). Note that the name C<64bitint> does
not imply that your C compiler will be using 64-bit Cs (it might,
but it doesn't have to): the C means that you will be
able to have 64 bits wide scalar values.
The C goes all the way by attempting to switch also
integers (if it can), longs (and pointers) to being 64-bit. This may
create an even more binary incompatible Perl than -Duse64bitint: the
resulting executable may not run at all in a 32-bit box, or you may
have to reboot/reconfigure/rebuild your operating system to be 64-bit
aware.
Natively 64-bit systems like Alpha and Cray need neither -Duse64bitint
nor -Duse64bitall.
NOTE: 64-bit support is still experimental on most platforms.
Existing support only covers the LP64 data model. In particular, the
LLP64 data model is not yet supported. 64-bit libraries and system
APIs on many platforms have not stabilized--your mileage may vary.
=head2 Long doubles
In some systems you may be able to use long doubles to enhance the
range and precision of your double precision floating point numbers
(that is, Perl's numbers). Use Configure -Duselongdouble to enable
this support (if it is available).
=head2 "more bits"
You can "Configure -Dusemorebits" to turn on both the 64-bit support
and the long double support.
=head2 Selecting File IO mechanisms
Executive summary: in Perl 5.8, you should use the default "PerlIO"
as the IO mechanism unless you have a good reason not to.
In more detail: previous versions of perl used the standard IO
mechanisms as defined in stdio.h. Versions 5.003_02 and later of perl
introduced alternate IO mechanisms via a "PerlIO" abstraction, but up
until and including Perl 5.6, the stdio mechanism was still the default
and the only supported mechanism.
Starting from Perl 5.8, the default mechanism is to use the PerlIO
abstraction, because it allows better control of I/O mechanisms,
instead of having to work with (often, work around) vendors' I/O
implementations.
This PerlIO abstraction can be (but again, unless you know what you
are doing, should not be) disabled either on the Configure command
line with
sh Configure -Uuseperlio
or interactively at the appropriate Configure prompt.
With the PerlIO abstraction layer, there is another possibility for
the underlying IO calls, AT&T's "sfio". This has superior performance
to stdio.h in many cases, and is extensible by the use of "discipline"
modules ("Native" PerlIO has them too). Sfio currently only builds on
a subset of the UNIX platforms perl supports. Because the data
structures are completely different from stdio, perl extension modules
or external libraries may not work. This configuration exists to
allow these issues to be worked on.
This option requires the 'sfio' package to have been built and installed.
The latest sfio is available from http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/sfio/
You select this option by
sh Configure -Duseperlio -Dusesfio
If you have already selected -Duseperlio, and if Configure detects
that you have sfio, then sfio will be the default suggested by
Configure.
Note: On some systems, sfio's iffe configuration script fails to
detect that you have an atexit function (or equivalent). Apparently,
this is a problem at least for some versions of Linux and SunOS 4.
Configure should detect this problem and warn you about problems with
_exit vs. exit. If you have this problem, the fix is to go back to
your sfio sources and correct iffe's guess about atexit.
=head2 Algorithmic Complexity Attacks on Hashes
In Perls 5.8.0 and earlier it was easy to create degenerate hashes.
Processing such hashes would consume large amounts of CPU time,
enabling a "Denial of Service" attack against Perl. Such hashes may be
a problem for example for mod_perl sites, sites with Perl CGI scripts
and web services, that process data originating from external sources.
In Perl 5.8.1 a security feature was introduced to make it harder
to create such degenerate hashes.
Because of this feature the keys(), values(), and each() functions
may return the hash elements in different order between different
runs of Perl even with the same data. One can still revert to the old
repeatable order by setting the environment variable PERL_HASH_SEED,
see L. Another option is to add -DUSE_HASH_SEED_EXPLICIT to
the compilation flags, in which case one has to explicitly set the
PERL_HASH_SEED environment variable to enable the security feature,
or -DNO_HASH_SEED to completely disable the feature.
B, and the
ordering has already changed several times during the lifetime of
Perl 5. Also, the ordering of hash keys has always been, and
continues to be, affected by the insertion order.
Note that because of this randomisation for example the Data::Dumper
results will be different between different runs of Perl since
Data::Dumper by default dumps hashes "unordered". The use of the
Data::Dumper C option is recommended.
=head2 SOCKS
Perl can be configured to be 'socksified', that is, to use the SOCKS
TCP/IP proxy protocol library. SOCKS is used to give applications
access to transport layer network proxies. Perl supports only SOCKS
Version 5. You can find more about SOCKS from http://www.socks.nec.com/
=head2 Dynamic Loading
By default, Configure will compile perl to use dynamic loading if
your system supports it. If you want to force perl to be compiled
statically, you can either choose this when Configure prompts you or
you can use the Configure command line option -Uusedl.
=head2 Building a shared Perl library
Currently, for most systems, the main perl executable is built by
linking the "perl library" libperl.a with perlmain.o, your static
extensions (usually just DynaLoader.a) and various extra libraries,
such as -lm.
On some systems that support dynamic loading, it may be possible to
replace libperl.a with a shared libperl.so. If you anticipate building
several different perl binaries (e.g. by embedding libperl into
different programs, or by using the optional compiler extension), then
you might wish to build a shared libperl.so so that all your binaries
can share the same library.
The disadvantages are that there may be a significant performance
penalty associated with the shared libperl.so, and that the overall
mechanism is still rather fragile with respect to different versions
and upgrades.
In terms of performance, on my test system (Solaris 2.5_x86) the perl
test suite took roughly 15% longer to run with the shared libperl.so.
Your system and typical applications may well give quite different
results.
The default name for the shared library is typically something like
libperl.so.3.2 (for Perl 5.003_02) or libperl.so.302 or simply
libperl.so. Configure tries to guess a sensible naming convention
based on your C library name. Since the library gets installed in a
version-specific architecture-dependent directory, the exact name
isn't very important anyway, as long as your linker is happy.
For some systems (mostly SVR4), building a shared libperl is required
for dynamic loading to work, and hence is already the default.
You can elect to build a shared libperl by
sh Configure -Duseshrplib
To build a shared libperl, the environment variable controlling shared
library search (LD_LIBRARY_PATH in most systems, DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH for
NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Darwin, LIBRARY_PATH for BeOS, LD_LIBRARY_PATH/SHLIB_PATH
for HP-UX, LIBPATH for AIX, PATH for Cygwin) must be set up to include
the Perl build directory because that's where the shared libperl will
be created. Configure arranges makefile to have the correct shared
library search settings. You can find the name of the environment
variable Perl thinks works in your your system by
grep ldlibpthname config.sh
However, there are some special cases where manually setting the
shared library path might be required. For example, if you want to run
something like the following with the newly-built but not-yet-installed
./perl:
cd t; ./perl misc/failing_test.t
or
./perl -Ilib ~/my_mission_critical_test
then you need to set up the shared library path explicitly.
You can do this with
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
for Bourne-style shells, or
setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH `pwd`
for Csh-style shells. (This procedure may also be needed if for some
unexpected reason Configure fails to set up makefile correctly.) (And
again, it may be something other than LD_LIBRARY_PATH for you, see above.)
You can often recognize failures to build/use a shared libperl from error
messages complaining about a missing libperl.so (or libperl.sl in HP-UX),
for example:
18126:./miniperl: /sbin/loader: Fatal Error: cannot map libperl.so
There is also an potential problem with the shared perl library if you
want to have more than one "flavor" of the same version of perl (e.g.
with and without -DDEBUGGING). For example, suppose you build and
install a standard Perl 5.8.0 with a shared library. Then, suppose you
try to build Perl 5.8.0 with -DDEBUGGING enabled, but everything else
the same, including all the installation directories. How can you
ensure that your newly built perl will link with your newly built
libperl.so.8 rather with the installed libperl.so.8? The answer is
that you might not be able to. The installation directory is encoded
in the perl binary with the LD_RUN_PATH environment variable (or
equivalent ld command-line option). On Solaris, you can override that
with LD_LIBRARY_PATH; on Linux, you can only override at runtime via
LD_PRELOAD, specifying the exact filename you wish to be used; and on
Digital Unix, you can override LD_LIBRARY_PATH by setting the
_RLD_ROOT environment variable to point to the perl build directory.
The only reliable answer is that you should specify a different
directory for the architecture-dependent library for your -DDEBUGGING
version of perl. You can do this by changing all the *archlib*
variables in config.sh to point to your new architecture-dependent library.
=head2 Malloc Issues
Perl relies heavily on malloc(3) to grow data structures as needed,
so perl's performance can be noticeably affected by the performance of
the malloc function on your system. The perl source is shipped with a
version of malloc that has been optimized for the typical requests from
perl, so there's a chance that it may be both faster and use less memory
than your system malloc.
However, if your system already has an excellent malloc, or if you are
experiencing difficulties with extensions that use third-party libraries
that call malloc, then you should probably use your system's malloc.
(Or, you might wish to explore the malloc flags discussed below.)
=over 4
=item Using the system malloc
To build without perl's malloc, you can use the Configure command
sh Configure -Uusemymalloc
or you can answer 'n' at the appropriate interactive Configure prompt.
=item -DPERL_POLLUTE_MALLOC
NOTE: This flag is enabled automatically on some platforms if you just
run Configure to accept all the defaults on those platforms.
Perl's malloc family of functions are normally called Perl_malloc(),
Perl_realloc(), Perl_calloc() and Perl_mfree().
These names do not clash with the system versions of these functions.
If this flag is enabled, however, Perl's malloc family of functions
will have the same names as the system versions. This may be required
sometimes if you have libraries that like to free() data that may have
been allocated by Perl_malloc() and vice versa.
Note that enabling this option may sometimes lead to duplicate symbols
from the linker for malloc et al. In such cases, the system probably
does not allow its malloc functions to be fully replaced with custom
versions.
=item -DPERL_DEBUGGING_MSTATS
This flag enables debugging mstats, which is required to use the
Devel::Peek::mstat() function. You cannot enable this unless you are
using Perl's malloc, so a typical Configure command would be
sh Configure -Accflags=-DPERL_DEBUGGING_MSTATS -Dusemymalloc='y'
to enable this option.
=back
=head2 Building a debugging perl
You can run perl scripts under the perl debugger at any time with
B. If, however, you want to debug perl itself,
you probably want to do
sh Configure -Doptimize='-g'
This will do two independent things: First, it will force compilation
to use cc -g so that you can use your system's debugger on the
executable. (Note: Your system may actually require something like
cc -g2. Check your man pages for cc(1) and also any hint file for
your system.) Second, it will add -DDEBUGGING to your ccflags
variable in config.sh so that you can use B to access perl's
internal state. (Note: Configure will only add -DDEBUGGING by default
if you are not reusing your old config.sh. If you want to reuse your
old config.sh, then you can just edit it and change the optimize and
ccflags variables by hand and then propagate your changes as shown in
L<"Propagating your changes to config.sh"> below.)
You can actually specify -g and -DDEBUGGING independently, but usually
it's convenient to have both.
If you are using a shared libperl, see the warnings about multiple
versions of perl under L.
=head2 Extensions
Perl ships with a number of standard extensions. These are contained
in the ext/ subdirectory.
By default, Configure will offer to build every extension which appears
to be supported. For example, Configure will offer to build GDBM_File
only if it is able to find the gdbm library. (See examples below.)
Configure does not contain code to test for POSIX compliance, so POSIX
is always built by default as well. If you wish to skip POSIX, you can
set the Configure variable useposix=false either in a hint file or from
the Configure command line.
If you unpack any additional extensions in the ext/ directory before
running Configure, then Configure will offer to build those additional
extensions as well. Most users probably shouldn't have to do this --
it is usually easier to build additional extensions later after perl
has been installed. However, if you wish to have those additional
extensions statically linked into the perl binary, then this offers a
convenient way to do that in one step. (It is not necessary, however;
you can build and install extensions just fine even if you don't have
dynamic loading. See lib/ExtUtils/MakeMaker.pm for more details.)
You can learn more about each of the supplied extensions by consulting the
documentation in the individual .pm modules, located under the
ext/ subdirectory.
Even if you do not have dynamic loading, you must still build the
DynaLoader extension; you should just build the stub dl_none.xs
version. (Configure will suggest this as the default.)
To disable certain extensions so that they are not built, use
the -Dnoextensions=... and -Donlyextensions=... options. They both
accept a space-separated list of extensions. The extensions listed
in C are removed from the list of extensions to build,
while the C is rather more severe and builds only
the listed extensions. The latter should be used with extreme caution
since certain extensions are used by many other extensions and modules:
such modules include Fcntl and IO. The order of processing these
options is first C (if present), then C (if present).
Another, older way to turn off various extensions (which is still good
to know if you have to work with older Perl) exists. Here are the
Configure command-line variables you can set to turn off various
extensions. All others are included by default.
DB_File i_db
DynaLoader (Must always be included as a static extension)
GDBM_File i_gdbm
NDBM_File i_ndbm
ODBM_File i_dbm
POSIX useposix
Opcode useopcode
Socket d_socket
Threads use5005threads
Thus to skip the NDBM_File extension, you can use
sh Configure -Ui_ndbm
Again, this is taken care of automatically if you don't have the ndbm
library.
Of course, you may always run Configure interactively and select only
the extensions you want.
Note: The DB_File module will only work with version 1.x of Berkeley
DB or newer releases of version 2. Configure will automatically detect
this for you and refuse to try to build DB_File with earlier
releases of version 2.
If you re-use your old config.sh but change your system (e.g. by
adding libgdbm) Configure will still offer your old choices of extensions
for the default answer, but it will also point out the discrepancy to
you.
Finally, if you have dynamic loading (most modern systems do)
remember that these extensions do not increase the size of your perl
executable, nor do they impact start-up time, so you probably might as
well build all the ones that will work on your system.
=head2 Including locally-installed libraries
Perl5 comes with interfaces to number of database extensions, including
dbm, ndbm, gdbm, and Berkeley db. For each extension, if
Configure can find the appropriate header files and libraries, it will
automatically include that extension. The gdbm and db libraries
are not included with perl. See the library documentation for
how to obtain the libraries.
If your database header (.h) files are not in a directory normally
searched by your C compiler, then you will need to include the
appropriate -I/your/directory option when prompted by Configure. If
your database library (.a) files are not in a directory normally
searched by your C compiler and linker, then you will need to include
the appropriate -L/your/directory option when prompted by Configure.
See the examples below.
=head2 Examples
=over 4
=item gdbm in /usr/local
Suppose you have gdbm and want Configure to find it and build the
GDBM_File extension. This example assumes you have gdbm.h
installed in /usr/local/include/gdbm.h and libgdbm.a installed in
/usr/local/lib/libgdbm.a. Configure should figure all the
necessary steps out automatically.
Specifically, when Configure prompts you for flags for
your C compiler, you should include -I/usr/local/include.
When Configure prompts you for linker flags, you should include
-L/usr/local/lib.
If you are using dynamic loading, then when Configure prompts you for
linker flags for dynamic loading, you should again include
-L/usr/local/lib.
Again, this should all happen automatically. This should also work if
you have gdbm installed in any of (/usr/local, /opt/local, /usr/gnu,
/opt/gnu, /usr/GNU, or /opt/GNU).
=item gdbm in /usr/you
Suppose you have gdbm installed in some place other than /usr/local/,
but you still want Configure to find it. To be specific, assume you
have /usr/you/include/gdbm.h and /usr/you/lib/libgdbm.a. You
still have to add -I/usr/you/include to cc flags, but you have to take
an extra step to help Configure find libgdbm.a. Specifically, when
Configure prompts you for library directories, you have to add
/usr/you/lib to the list.
It is possible to specify this from the command line too (all on one
line):
sh Configure -de \
-Dlocincpth="/usr/you/include" \
-Dloclibpth="/usr/you/lib"
locincpth is a space-separated list of include directories to search.
Configure will automatically add the appropriate -I directives.
loclibpth is a space-separated list of library directories to search.
Configure will automatically add the appropriate -L directives. If
you have some libraries under /usr/local/ and others under
/usr/you, then you have to include both, namely
sh Configure -de \
-Dlocincpth="/usr/you/include /usr/local/include" \
-Dloclibpth="/usr/you/lib /usr/local/lib"
=back
=head2 Building DB, NDBM, and ODBM interfaces with Berkeley DB 3
Perl interface for DB3 is part of Berkeley DB, but if you want to
compile standard Perl DB/ODBM/NDBM interfaces, you must follow
following instructions.
Berkeley DB3 from Sleepycat Software is by default installed without
DB1 compatibility code (needed for DB_File interface) and without
links to compatibility files. So if you want to use packages written
for DB/ODBM/NDBM interfaces, you need to configure DB3 with
--enable-compat185 (and optionally with --enable-dump185) and create
additional references (suppose you are installing DB3 with
--prefix=/usr):
ln -s libdb-3.so /usr/lib/libdbm.so
ln -s libdb-3.so /usr/lib/libndbm.so
echo '#define DB_DBM_HSEARCH 1' >dbm.h
echo '#include ' >>dbm.h
install -m 0644 dbm.h /usr/include/dbm.h
install -m 0644 dbm.h /usr/include/ndbm.h
Optionally, if you have compiled with --enable-compat185 (not needed
for ODBM/NDBM):
ln -s libdb-3.so /usr/lib/libdb1.so
ln -s libdb-3.so /usr/lib/libdb.so
ODBM emulation seems not to be perfect, but is quite usable,
using DB 3.1.17:
lib/odbm.............FAILED at test 9
Failed 1/64 tests, 98.44% okay
=head2 What if it doesn't work?
If you run into problems, try some of the following ideas.
If none of them help, then see L<"Reporting Problems"> below.
=over 4
=item Running Configure Interactively
If Configure runs into trouble, remember that you can always run
Configure interactively so that you can check (and correct) its
guesses.
All the installation questions have been moved to the top, so you don't
have to wait for them. Once you've handled them (and your C compiler and
flags) you can type &-d at the next Configure prompt and Configure
will use the defaults from then on.
If you find yourself trying obscure command line incantations and
config.over tricks, I recommend you run Configure interactively
instead. You'll probably save yourself time in the long run.
=item Hint files
The perl distribution includes a number of system-specific hints files
in the hints/ directory. If one of them matches your system, Configure
will offer to use that hint file.
Several of the hint files contain additional important information.
If you have any problems, it is a good idea to read the relevant hint file
for further information. See hints/solaris_2.sh for an extensive example.
More information about writing good hints is in the hints/README.hints
file.
=item *** WHOA THERE!!! ***
Occasionally, Configure makes a wrong guess. For example, on SunOS
4.1.3, Configure incorrectly concludes that tzname[] is in the
standard C library. The hint file is set up to correct for this. You
will see a message:
*** WHOA THERE!!! ***
The recommended value for $d_tzname on this machine was "undef"!
Keep the recommended value? [y]
You should always keep the recommended value unless, after reading the
relevant section of the hint file, you are sure you want to try
overriding it.
If you are re-using an old config.sh, the word "previous" will be
used instead of "recommended". Again, you will almost always want
to keep the previous value, unless you have changed something on your
system.
For example, suppose you have added libgdbm.a to your system
and you decide to reconfigure perl to use GDBM_File. When you run
Configure again, you will need to add -lgdbm to the list of libraries.
Now, Configure will find your gdbm include file and library and will
issue a message:
*** WHOA THERE!!! ***
The previous value for $i_gdbm on this machine was "undef"!
Keep the previous value? [y]
In this case, you do not want to keep the previous value, so you
should answer 'n'. (You'll also have to manually add GDBM_File to
the list of dynamic extensions to build.)
=item Changing Compilers
If you change compilers or make other significant changes, you should
probably not re-use your old config.sh. Simply remove it or
rename it, e.g. mv config.sh config.sh.old. Then rerun Configure
with the options you want to use.
This is a common source of problems. If you change from cc to
gcc, you should almost always remove your old config.sh.
=item Propagating your changes to config.sh
If you make any changes to config.sh, you should propagate
them to all the .SH files by running
sh Configure -S
You will then have to rebuild by running
make depend
make
=item config.over and config.arch
You can also supply a shell script config.over to over-ride
Configure's guesses. It will get loaded up at the very end, just
before config.sh is created. You have to be careful with this,
however, as Configure does no checking that your changes make sense.
This file is usually good for site-specific customizations.
There is also another file that, if it exists, is loaded before the
config.over, called config.arch. This file is intended to be per
architecture, not per site, and usually it's the architecture-specific
hints file that creates the config.arch.
=item config.h
Many of the system dependencies are contained in config.h.
Configure builds config.h by running the config_h.SH script.
The values for the variables are taken from config.sh.
If there are any problems, you can edit config.h directly. Beware,
though, that the next time you run Configure, your changes will be
lost.
=item cflags
If you have any additional changes to make to the C compiler command
line, they can be made in cflags.SH. For instance, to turn off the
optimizer on toke.c, find the line in the switch structure for
toke.c and put the command optimize='-g' before the ;; . You
can also edit cflags directly, but beware that your changes will be
lost the next time you run Configure.
To explore various ways of changing ccflags from within a hint file,
see the file hints/README.hints.
To change the C flags for all the files, edit config.sh and change either
$ccflags or $optimize, and then re-run
sh Configure -S
make depend
=item No sh
If you don't have sh, you'll have to copy the sample file
Porting/config.sh to config.sh and edit your config.sh to reflect your
system's peculiarities. See Porting/pumpkin.pod for more information.
You'll probably also have to extensively modify the extension building
mechanism.
=item Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX and BIN_SH
In Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX, Configure might abort with
Build a threading Perl? [n]
Configure[2437]: Syntax error at line 1 : `config.sh' is not expected.
This indicates that Configure is being run with a broken Korn shell
(even though you think you are using a Bourne shell by using
"sh Configure" or "./Configure"). The Korn shell bug has been reported
to Compaq as of February 1999 but in the meanwhile, the reason ksh is
being used is that you have the environment variable BIN_SH set to
'xpg4'. This causes /bin/sh to delegate its duties to /bin/posix/sh
(a ksh). Unset the environment variable and rerun Configure.
=item HP-UX 11, pthreads, and libgdbm
If you are running Configure with -Dusethreads in HP-UX 11, be warned
that POSIX threads and libgdbm (the GNU dbm library) compiled before
HP-UX 11 do not mix. This will cause a basic test run by Configure to
fail
Pthread internal error: message: __libc_reinit() failed, file: ../pthreads/pthread.c, line: 1096
Return Pointer is 0xc082bf33
sh: 5345 Quit(coredump)
and Configure will give up. The cure is to recompile and install
libgdbm under HP-UX 11.
=item Porting information
Specific information for the OS/2, Plan 9, VMS and Win32 ports is in the
corresponding README files and subdirectories. Additional information,
including a glossary of all those config.sh variables, is in the Porting
subdirectory. Especially Porting/Glossary should come in handy.
Ports for other systems may also be available. You should check out
http://www.cpan.org/ports for current information on ports to
various other operating systems.
If you plan to port Perl to a new architecture study carefully the
section titled "Philosophical Issues in Patching and Porting Perl"
in the file Porting/pumpkin.pod and the file Porting/patching.pod.
Study also how other non-UNIX ports have solved problems.
=back
=head1 Adding extra modules to the build
You can specify extra modules or module bundles to be fetched from the
CPAN and installed as part of the Perl build. Either use the -Dextras=...
command line parameter to Configure, for example like this:
Configure -Dextras="Compress::Zlib Bundle::LWP DBI"
or answer first 'y' to the question 'Install any extra modules?' and
then answer "Compress::Zlib Bundle::LWP DBI" to the 'Extras?' question.
The module or the bundle names are as for the CPAN module 'install' command.
Notice that because the CPAN module will be used to fetch the extra
modules, you will need access to the CPAN, either via the Internet,
or via a local copy such as a CD-ROM or a local CPAN mirror. If you
do not, using the extra modules option will die horribly.
Also notice that you yourself are responsible for satisfying any extra
dependencies such as external headers or libraries BEFORE trying the build.
For example: you will need to have the zlib.h header and the libz
library installed for the Compress::Zlib, or the Foo database specific
headers and libraries installed for the DBD::Foo module. The Configure
process or the Perl build process will not help you with these.
=head1 suidperl
suidperl is an optional component, which is built or installed by default.
From perlfaq1:
On some systems, setuid and setgid scripts (scripts written
in the C shell, Bourne shell, or Perl, for example, with the
set user or group ID permissions enabled) are insecure due to
a race condition in the kernel. For those systems, Perl versions
5 and 4 attempt to work around this vulnerability with an optional
component, a special program named suidperl, also known as sperl.
This program attempts to emulate the set-user-ID and set-group-ID
features of the kernel.
Because of the buggy history of suidperl, and the difficulty
of properly security auditing as large and complex piece of
software as Perl, we cannot recommend using suidperl and the feature
should be considered deprecated.
Instead use for example 'sudo': http://www.courtesan.com/sudo/
=head1 make depend
This will look for all the includes. The output is stored in makefile.
The only difference between Makefile and makefile is the dependencies at
the bottom of makefile. If you have to make any changes, you should edit
makefile, not Makefile since the Unix make command reads makefile first.
(On non-Unix systems, the output may be stored in a different file.
Check the value of $firstmakefile in your config.sh if in doubt.)
Configure will offer to do this step for you, so it isn't listed
explicitly above.
=head1 make
This will attempt to make perl in the current directory.
=head2 What if it doesn't work?
If you can't compile successfully, try some of the following ideas.
If none of them help, and careful reading of the error message and
the relevant manual pages on your system doesn't help,
then see L<"Reporting Problems"> below.
=over 4
=item hints
If you used a hint file, try reading the comments in the hint file
for further tips and information.
=item extensions
If you can successfully build miniperl, but the process crashes
during the building of extensions, you should run
make minitest
to test your version of miniperl.
=item locale
If you have any locale-related environment variables set, try unsetting
them. I have some reports that some versions of IRIX hang while
running B<./miniperl configpm> with locales other than the C locale.
See the discussion under L<"make test"> below about locales and the
whole L<"Locale problems"> section in the file pod/perllocale.pod.
The latter is especially useful if you see something like this
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LC_ALL = "En_US",
LANG = (unset)
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
at Perl startup.
=item varargs
If you get varargs problems with gcc, be sure that gcc is installed
correctly and that you are not passing -I/usr/include to gcc. When using
gcc, you should probably have i_stdarg='define' and i_varargs='undef'
in config.sh. The problem is usually solved by running fixincludes
correctly. If you do change config.sh, don't forget to propagate
your changes (see L<"Propagating your changes to config.sh"> below).
See also the L<"vsprintf"> item below.
=item util.c
If you get error messages such as the following (the exact line
numbers and function name may vary in different versions of perl):
util.c: In function `Perl_form':
util.c:1107: number of arguments doesn't match prototype
proto.h:125: prototype declaration
it might well be a symptom of the gcc "varargs problem". See the
previous L<"varargs"> item.
=item LD_LIBRARY_PATH
If you run into dynamic loading problems, check your setting of
the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. If you're creating a static
Perl library (libperl.a rather than libperl.so) it should build
fine with LD_LIBRARY_PATH unset, though that may depend on details
of your local set-up.
=item nm extraction
If Configure seems to be having trouble finding library functions,
try not using nm extraction. You can do this from the command line
with
sh Configure -Uusenm
or by answering the nm extraction question interactively.
If you have previously run Configure, you should not reuse your old
config.sh.
=item umask not found
If the build processes encounters errors relating to umask(), the problem
is probably that Configure couldn't find your umask() system call.
Check your config.sh. You should have d_umask='define'. If you don't,
this is probably the L<"nm extraction"> problem discussed above. Also,
try reading the hints file for your system for further information.
=item vsprintf
If you run into problems with vsprintf in compiling util.c, the
problem is probably that Configure failed to detect your system's
version of vsprintf(). Check whether your system has vprintf().
(Virtually all modern Unix systems do.) Then, check the variable
d_vprintf in config.sh. If your system has vprintf, it should be:
d_vprintf='define'
If Configure guessed wrong, it is likely that Configure guessed wrong
on a number of other common functions too. This is probably
the L<"nm extraction"> problem discussed above.
=item do_aspawn
If you run into problems relating to do_aspawn or do_spawn, the
problem is probably that Configure failed to detect your system's
fork() function. Follow the procedure in the previous item
on L<"nm extraction">.
=item __inet_* errors
If you receive unresolved symbol errors during Perl build and/or test
referring to __inet_* symbols, check to see whether BIND 8.1 is
installed. It installs a /usr/local/include/arpa/inet.h that refers to
these symbols. Versions of BIND later than 8.1 do not install inet.h
in that location and avoid the errors. You should probably update to a
newer version of BIND (and remove the files the old one left behind).
If you can't, you can either link with the updated resolver library provided
with BIND 8.1 or rename /usr/local/bin/arpa/inet.h during the Perl build and
test process to avoid the problem.
=item *_r() prototype NOT found
On a related note, if you see a bunch of complaints like the above about
reentrant functions - specifically networking-related ones - being present
but without prototypes available, check to see if BIND 8.1 (or possibly
other BIND 8 versions) is (or has been) installed. They install
header files such as netdb.h into places such as /usr/local/include (or into
another directory as specified at build/install time), at least optionally.
Remove them or put them in someplace that isn't in the C preprocessor's
header file include search path (determined by -I options plus defaults,
normally /usr/include).
=item #error "No DATAMODEL_NATIVE specified"
This is a common error when trying to build perl on Solaris 2.6 with a
gcc installation from Solaris 2.5 or 2.5.1. The Solaris header files
changed, so you need to update your gcc installation. You can either
rerun the fixincludes script from gcc or take the opportunity to
update your gcc installation.
=item Optimizer
If you can't compile successfully, try turning off your compiler's
optimizer. Edit config.sh and change the line
optimize='-O'
to
optimize=' '
then propagate your changes with B and rebuild
with B.
=item Missing functions
If you have missing routines, you probably need to add some library or
other, or you need to undefine some feature that Configure thought was
there but is defective or incomplete. Look through config.h for
likely suspects. If Configure guessed wrong on a number of functions,
you might have the L<"nm extraction"> problem discussed above.
=item toke.c
Some compilers will not compile or optimize the larger files (such as
toke.c) without some extra switches to use larger jump offsets or
allocate larger internal tables. You can customize the switches for
each file in cflags. It's okay to insert rules for specific files into
makefile since a default rule only takes effect in the absence of a
specific rule.
=item Missing dbmclose
SCO prior to 3.2.4 may be missing dbmclose(). An upgrade to 3.2.4
that includes libdbm.nfs (which includes dbmclose()) may be available.
=item Note (probably harmless): No library found for -lsomething
If you see such a message during the building of an extension, but
the extension passes its tests anyway (see L<"make test"> below),
then don't worry about the warning message. The extension
Makefile.PL goes looking for various libraries needed on various
systems; few systems will need all the possible libraries listed.
For example, a system may have -lcposix or -lposix, but it's
unlikely to have both, so most users will see warnings for the one
they don't have. The phrase 'probably harmless' is intended to
reassure you that nothing unusual is happening, and the build
process is continuing.
On the other hand, if you are building GDBM_File and you get the
message
Note (probably harmless): No library found for -lgdbm
then it's likely you're going to run into trouble somewhere along
the line, since it's hard to see how you can use the GDBM_File
extension without the -lgdbm library.
It is true that, in principle, Configure could have figured all of
this out, but Configure and the extension building process are not
quite that tightly coordinated.
=item sh: ar: not found
This is a message from your shell telling you that the command 'ar'
was not found. You need to check your PATH environment variable to
make sure that it includes the directory with the 'ar' command. This
is a common problem on Solaris, where 'ar' is in the /usr/ccs/bin
directory.
=item db-recno failure on tests 51, 53 and 55
Old versions of the DB library (including the DB library which comes
with FreeBSD 2.1) had broken handling of recno databases with modified
bval settings. Upgrade your DB library or OS.
=item Bad arg length for semctl, is XX, should be ZZZ
If you get this error message from the ext/IPC/SysV/t/sem test, your System
V IPC may be broken. The XX typically is 20, and that is what ZZZ
also should be. Consider upgrading your OS, or reconfiguring your OS
to include the System V semaphores.
=item ext/IPC/SysV/t/sem........semget: No space left on device
Either your account or the whole system has run out of semaphores. Or
both. Either list the semaphores with "ipcs" and remove the unneeded
ones (which ones these are depends on your system and applications)
with "ipcrm -s SEMAPHORE_ID_HERE" or configure more semaphores to your
system.
=item GNU binutils
If you mix GNU binutils (nm, ld, ar) with equivalent vendor-supplied
tools you may be in for some trouble. For example creating archives
with an old GNU 'ar' and then using a new current vendor-supplied 'ld'
may lead into linking problems. Either recompile your GNU binutils
under your current operating system release, or modify your PATH not
to include the GNU utils before running Configure, or specify the
vendor-supplied utilities explicitly to Configure, for example by
Configure -Dar=/bin/ar.
=item THIS PACKAGE SEEMS TO BE INCOMPLETE
The F program has not been able to find all the files which
make up the complete Perl distribution. You may have a damaged source
archive file (in which case you may also have seen messages such as
C and C), or you may have obtained a structurally-sound but
incomplete archive. In either case, try downloading again from the
official site named at the start of this document. If you do find
that any site is carrying a corrupted or incomplete source code
archive, please report it to the site's maintainer.
=item invalid token: ##
You are using a non-ANSI-compliant C compiler. See L.
=item Miscellaneous
Some additional things that have been reported for either perl4 or perl5:
Genix may need to use libc rather than libc_s, or #undef VARARGS.
NCR Tower 32 (OS 2.01.01) may need -W2,-Sl,2000 and #undef MKDIR.
UTS may need one or more of -K or -g, and undef LSTAT.
FreeBSD can fail the ext/IPC/SysV/t/sem.t test if SysV IPC has not been
configured in the kernel. Perl tries to detect this, though, and
you will get a message telling what to do.
HP-UX 11 Y2K patch "Y2K-1100 B.11.00.B0125 HP-UX Core OS Year 2000
Patch Bundle" has been reported to break the io/fs test #18 which
tests whether utime() can change timestamps. The Y2K patch seems to
break utime() so that over NFS the timestamps do not get changed
(on local filesystems utime() still works).
Building Perl on a system that has also BIND (headers and libraries)
installed may run into troubles because BIND installs its own netdb.h
and socket.h, which may not agree with the operating system's ideas of
the same files. Similarly, including -lbind may conflict with libc's
view of the world. You may have to tweak -Dlocincpth and -Dloclibpth
to avoid the BIND.
=back
=head2 Cross-compilation
Starting from Perl 5.8 Perl has the beginnings of cross-compilation
support. What is known to work is running Configure in a
cross-compilation environment and building the miniperl executable.
What is known not to work is building the perl executable because
that would require building extensions: Dynaloader statically and
File::Glob dynamically, for extensions one needs MakeMaker and
MakeMaker is not yet cross-compilation aware, and neither is
the main Makefile.
Since the functionality is so lacking, it must be considered
highly experimental. It is so experimental that it is not even
mentioned during an interactive Configure session, a direct command
line invocation (detailed shortly) is required to access the
functionality.
NOTE: Perl is routinely built using cross-compilation
in the EPOC environment, in the WinCE, and in the OpenZaurus
project, but all those use something slightly different setup
than what described here. For the WinCE setup, read the
wince/README.compile. For the OpenZaurus setup, read the
Cross/README.
The one environment where this cross-compilation setup has
successfully been used as of this writing is the Compaq iPAQ running
ARM Linux. The build host was Intel Linux, the networking setup was
PPP + SSH. The exact setup details are beyond the scope of this
document, see http://www.handhelds.org/ for more information.
To run Configure in cross-compilation mode the basic switch is
C<-Dusecrosscompile>.
sh ./Configure -des -Dusecrosscompile -D...
This will make the cpp symbol USE_CROSS_COMPILE and the %Config
symbol C available.
During the Configure and build, certain helper scripts will be created
into the Cross/ subdirectory. The scripts are used to execute a
cross-compiled executable, and to transfer files to and from the
target host. The execution scripts are named F and the
transfer scripts F and F. The part after the dash is
the method to use for remote execution and transfer: by default the
methods are B and B, thus making the scripts F,
F, and F.
To configure the scripts for a target host and a directory (in which
the execution will happen and which is to and from where the transfer
happens), supply Configure with
-Dtargethost=so.me.ho.st -Dtargetdir=/tar/get/dir
The targethost is what e.g. ssh will use as the hostname, the targetdir
must exist (the scripts won't create it), the targetdir defaults to /tmp.
You can also specify a username to use for ssh/rsh logins
-Dtargetuser=luser
but in case you don't, "root" will be used.
Because this is a cross-compilation effort, you will also need to specify
which target environment and which compilation environment to use.
This includes the compiler, the header files, and the libraries.
In the below we use the usual settings for the iPAQ cross-compilation
environment:
-Dtargetarch=arm-linux
-Dcc=arm-linux-gcc
-Dusrinc=/skiff/local/arm-linux/include
-Dincpth=/skiff/local/arm-linux/include
-Dlibpth=/skiff/local/arm-linux/lib
If the name of the C has the usual GNU C semantics for cross
compilers, that is, CPU-OS-gcc, the names of the C, C, and
C will also be automatically chosen to be CPU-OS-ar and so on.
(The C requires more thought and will be chosen later by Configure
as appropriate.) Also, in this case the incpth, libpth, and usrinc
will be guessed by Configure (unless explicitly set to something else,
in which case Configure's guesses with be appended).
In addition to the default execution/transfer methods you can also
choose B for execution, and B or B for transfer,
for example:
-Dtargetrun=rsh -Dtargetto=rcp -Dtargetfrom=cp
Putting it all together:
sh ./Configure -des -Dusecrosscompile \
-Dtargethost=so.me.ho.st \
-Dtargetdir=/tar/get/dir \
-Dtargetuser=root \
-Dtargetarch=arm-linux \
-Dcc=arm-linux-gcc \
-Dusrinc=/skiff/local/arm-linux/include \
-Dincpth=/skiff/local/arm-linux/include \
-Dlibpth=/skiff/local/arm-linux/lib \
-D...
or if you are happy with the defaults
sh ./Configure -des -Dusecrosscompile \
-Dtargethost=so.me.ho.st \
-Dcc=arm-linux-gcc \
-D...
=head1 make test
This will run the regression tests on the perl you just made. If
'make test' doesn't say "All tests successful" then something went
wrong. See the file t/README in the t subdirectory.
Note that you can't run the tests in background if this disables
opening of /dev/tty. You can use 'make test-notty' in that case but
a few tty tests will be skipped.
=head2 What if make test doesn't work?
If make test bombs out, just cd to the t directory and run ./TEST
by hand to see if it makes any difference. If individual tests
bomb, you can run them by hand, e.g.,
./perl op/groups.t
Another way to get more detailed information about failed tests and
individual subtests is to cd to the t directory and run
./perl harness
(this assumes that most basic tests succeed, since harness uses
complicated constructs). For extension and library tests you
need a little bit more: you need to setup your environment variable
PERL_CORE to a true value (like "1"), and you need to supply the
right Perl library path:
setenv PERL_CORE 1
./perl -I../lib ../ext/Socket/Socket.t
./perl -I../lib ../lib/less.t
(For csh-like shells on UNIX; adjust appropriately for other platforms.)
You should also read the individual tests to see if there are any helpful
comments that apply to your system. You may also need to setup your
shared library path if you get errors like:
/sbin/loader: Fatal Error: cannot map libperl.so
See L earlier in this document.
=over 4
=item locale
Note: One possible reason for errors is that some external programs
may be broken due to the combination of your environment and the way
B exercises them. For example, this may happen if you have
one or more of these environment variables set: LC_ALL LC_CTYPE
LC_COLLATE LANG. In some versions of UNIX, the non-English locales
are known to cause programs to exhibit mysterious errors.
If you have any of the above environment variables set, please try
setenv LC_ALL C
(for C shell) or
LC_ALL=C;export LC_ALL
for Bourne or Korn shell) from the command line and then retry
make test. If the tests then succeed, you may have a broken program that
is confusing the testing. Please run the troublesome test by hand as
shown above and see whether you can locate the program. Look for
things like: exec, `backquoted command`, system, open("|...") or
open("...|"). All these mean that Perl is trying to run some
external program.
=item Timing problems
Several tests in the test suite check timing functions, such as
sleep(), and see if they return in a reasonable amount of time.
If your system is quite busy and doesn't respond quickly enough,
these tests might fail. If possible, try running the tests again
with the system under a lighter load. These timing-sensitive
and load-sensitive tests include F,
F, F,
F, and F.
=item Out of memory
On some systems, particularly those with smaller amounts of RAM, some
of the tests in t/op/pat.t may fail with an "Out of memory" message.
For example, on my SparcStation IPC with 12 MB of RAM, in perl5.5.670,
test 85 will fail if run under either t/TEST or t/harness.
Try stopping other jobs on the system and then running the test by itself:
cd t; ./perl op/pat.t
to see if you have any better luck. If your perl still fails this
test, it does not necessarily mean you have a broken perl. This test
tries to exercise the regular expression subsystem quite thoroughly,
and may well be far more demanding than your normal usage.
=item Failures from lib/File/Temp/t/security saying "system possibly insecure"
First, such warnings are not necessarily serious or indicative of a
real security threat. That being said, they bear investigating.
Note that each of the tests is run twice. The first time is in the
directory returned by File::Spec->tmpdir() (often /tmp on Unix
systems), and the second time in the directory from which the test was
run (usually the 't' directory, if the test was run as part of 'make
test').
The tests may fail for the following reasons:
(1) If the directory the tests are being run in is owned by somebody
other than the user running the tests, or by root (uid 0).
This failure can happen if the Perl source code distribution is
unpacked in such a way that the user ids in the distribution package
are used as-is. Some tar programs do this.
(2) If the directory the tests are being run in is writable by group or
by others, and there is no sticky bit set for the directory. (With
UNIX/POSIX semantics, write access to a directory means the right to
add or remove files in that directory. The 'sticky bit' is a feature
used in some UNIXes to give extra protection to files: if the bit is
set for a directory, no one but the owner (or root) can remove that
file even if the permissions would otherwise allow file removal by
others.)
This failure may or may not be a real problem: it depends on the
permissions policy used on this particular system. This failure can
also happen if the system either doesn't support the sticky bit (this
is the case with many non-UNIX platforms: in principle File::Temp
should know about these platforms and skip the tests), or if the system
supports the sticky bit but for some reason or reasons it is not being
used. This is, for example, the case with HP-UX: as of HP-UX release
11.00, the sticky bit is very much supported, but HP-UX doesn't use it
on its /tmp directory as shipped. Also, as with the permissions, some
local policy might dictate that the stickiness is not used.
(3) If the system supports the POSIX 'chown giveaway' feature and if
any of the parent directories of the temporary file back to the root
directory are 'unsafe', using the definitions given above in (1) and
(2). For Unix systems, this is usually not an issue if you are
building on a local disk. See the documentation for the File::Temp
module for more information about 'chown giveaway'.
See the documentation for the File::Temp module for more information
about the various security aspects of temporary files.
=back
=head1 make install
This will put perl into the public directory you specified to
Configure; by default this is /usr/local/bin. It will also try
to put the man pages in a reasonable place. It will not nroff the man
pages, however. You may need to be root to run B. If you
are not root, you must own the directories in question and you should
ignore any messages about chown not working.
=head2 Installing perl under different names
If you want to install perl under a name other than "perl" (for example,
when installing perl with special features enabled, such as debugging),
indicate the alternate name on the "make install" line, such as:
make install PERLNAME=myperl
You can separately change the base used for versioned names (like
"perl5.005") by setting PERLNAME_VERBASE, like
make install PERLNAME=perl5 PERLNAME_VERBASE=perl
This can be useful if you have to install perl as "perl5" (e.g. to
avoid conflicts with an ancient version in /usr/bin supplied by your vendor).
Without this the versioned binary would be called "perl55.005".
=head2 Installed files
If you want to see exactly what will happen without installing
anything, you can run
./perl installperl -n
./perl installman -n
make install will install the following:
binaries
perl,
perl5.nnn where nnn is the current release number. This
will be a link to perl.
suidperl,
sperl5.nnn If you requested setuid emulation.
a2p awk-to-perl translator
scripts
cppstdin This is used by perl -P, if your cc -E can't
read from stdin.
c2ph, pstruct Scripts for handling C structures in header files.
s2p sed-to-perl translator
find2perl find-to-perl translator
h2ph Extract constants and simple macros from C headers
h2xs Converts C .h header files to Perl extensions.
perlbug Tool to report bugs in Perl.
perldoc Tool to read perl's pod documentation.
pl2pm Convert Perl 4 .pl files to Perl 5 .pm modules
pod2html, Converters from perl's pod documentation format
pod2latex, to other useful formats.
pod2man,
pod2text,
pod2checker,
pod2select,
pod2usage
splain Describe Perl warnings and errors
dprofpp Perl code profile post-processor
library files
in $privlib and $archlib specified to
Configure, usually under /usr/local/lib/perl5/.
documentation
man pages in $man1dir, usually /usr/local/man/man1.
module man
pages in $man3dir, usually /usr/local/man/man3.
pod/*.pod in $privlib/pod/.
Installperl will also create the directories listed above
in L<"Installation Directories">.
Perl's *.h header files and the libperl library are also installed
under $archlib so that any user may later build new modules, run the
optional Perl compiler, or embed the perl interpreter into another
program even if the Perl source is no longer available.
Sometimes you only want to install the version-specific parts of the perl
installation. For example, you may wish to install a newer version of
perl alongside an already installed production version of perl without
disabling installation of new modules for the production version.
To only install the version-specific parts of the perl installation, run
Configure -Dversiononly
or answer 'y' to the appropriate Configure prompt. Alternatively,
you can just manually run
./perl installperl -v
and skip installman altogether.
See also L<"Maintaining completely separate versions"> for another
approach.
=head1 Coexistence with earlier versions of perl5
Perl 5.8 is not binary compatible with earlier versions of Perl.
In other words, you will have to recompile your XS modules.
In general, you can usually safely upgrade from one version of Perl (e.g.
5.004_04) to another similar version (e.g. 5.004_05) without re-compiling
all of your add-on extensions. You can also safely leave the old version
around in case the new version causes you problems for some reason.
For example, if you want to be sure that your script continues to run
with 5.004_04, simply replace the '#!/usr/local/bin/perl' line at the
top of the script with the particular version you want to run, e.g.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl5.00404.
Usually, most extensions will probably not need to be recompiled to
use with a newer version of Perl (the Perl 5.6 to Perl 5.8 transition
being an exception). Here is how it is supposed to work. (These
examples assume you accept all the Configure defaults.)
Suppose you already have version 5.005_03 installed. The directories
searched by 5.005_03 are
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.00503/$archname
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.00503
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/$archname
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005
Beginning with 5.6.0 the version number in the site libraries are
fully versioned. Now, suppose you install version 5.6.0. The directories
searched by version 5.6.0 will be
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.6.0/$archname
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.6.0
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/$archname
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/$archname
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/
Notice the last three entries -- Perl understands the default structure
of the $sitelib directories and will look back in older, compatible
directories. This way, modules installed under 5.005_03 will continue
to be usable by 5.005_03 but will also accessible to 5.6.0. Further,
suppose that you upgrade a module to one which requires features
present only in 5.6.0. That new module will get installed into
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0 and will be available to 5.6.0,
but will not interfere with the 5.005_03 version.
The last entry, /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/, is there so that
5.6.0 and above will look for 5.004-era pure perl modules.
Lastly, suppose you now install 5.8.0, which is not binary compatible
with 5.6.0. The directories searched by 5.8.0 (if you don't change the
Configure defaults) will be:
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.0/$archname
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.0
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/$archname
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/
Note that the earlier $archname entries are now gone, but pure perl
modules from earlier versions will still be found.
Assuming the users in your site are still actively using perl 5.6.0 and
5.005 after you installed 5.8.0, you can continue to install add-on
extensions using any of perl 5.8.0, 5.6.0, or 5.005. The installations
of these different versions remain distinct, but remember that the
newer versions of perl are automatically set up to search the
compatible site libraries of the older ones. This means that
installing a new XS extension with 5.005 will make it visible to both
5.005 and 5.6.0, but not to 5.8.0. Installing a pure perl module with
5.005 will make it visible to all three versions. Later, if you
install the same extension using, say, perl 5.8.0, it will override the
5.005-installed version, but only for perl 5.8.0.
This way, you can choose to share compatible extensions, but also upgrade
to a newer version of an extension that may be incompatible with earlier
versions, without breaking the earlier versions' installations.
=head2 Maintaining completely separate versions
Many users prefer to keep all versions of perl in completely
separate directories. This guarantees that an update to one version
won't interfere with another version. (The defaults guarantee this for
libraries after 5.6.0, but not for executables. TODO?) One convenient
way to do this is by using a separate prefix for each version, such as
sh Configure -Dprefix=/opt/perl5.004
and adding /opt/perl5.004/bin to the shell PATH variable. Such users
may also wish to add a symbolic link /usr/local/bin/perl so that
scripts can still start with #!/usr/local/bin/perl.
Others might share a common directory for maintenance sub-versions
(e.g. 5.8 for all 5.8.x versions), but change directory with
each major version.
If you are installing a development subversion, you probably ought to
seriously consider using a separate directory, since development
subversions may not have all the compatibility wrinkles ironed out
yet.
=head2 Upgrading from 5.005 or 5.6 to 5.8.0
B Perl modules having binary parts
(meaning that a C compiler is used) will have to be recompiled to be
used with 5.8.0. If you find you do need to rebuild an extension with
5.8.0, you may safely do so without disturbing the 5.005 or 5.6.0
installations. (See L<"Coexistence with earlier versions of perl5">
above.)
See your installed copy of the perllocal.pod file for a (possibly
incomplete) list of locally installed modules. Note that you want
perllocal.pod, not perllocale.pod, for installed module information.
=head1 Coexistence with perl4
You can safely install perl5 even if you want to keep perl4 around.
By default, the perl5 libraries go into /usr/local/lib/perl5/, so
they don't override the perl4 libraries in /usr/local/lib/perl/.
In your /usr/local/bin directory, you should have a binary named
perl4.036. That will not be touched by the perl5 installation
process. Most perl4 scripts should run just fine under perl5.
However, if you have any scripts that require perl4, you can replace
the #! line at the top of them by #!/usr/local/bin/perl4.036 (or
whatever the appropriate pathname is). See pod/perltrap.pod for
possible problems running perl4 scripts under perl5.
=head1 cd /usr/include; h2ph *.h sys/*.h
Some perl scripts need to be able to obtain information from the
system header files. This command will convert the most commonly used
header files in /usr/include into files that can be easily interpreted
by perl. These files will be placed in the architecture-dependent
library ($archlib) directory you specified to Configure.
Note: Due to differences in the C and perl languages, the conversion
of the header files is not perfect. You will probably have to
hand-edit some of the converted files to get them to parse correctly.
For example, h2ph breaks spectacularly on type casting and certain
structures.
=head1 installhtml --help
Some sites may wish to make perl documentation available in HTML
format. The installhtml utility can be used to convert pod
documentation into linked HTML files and install them.
Currently, the supplied ./installhtml script does not make use of the
html Configure variables. This should be fixed in a future release.
The following command-line is an example of one used to convert
perl documentation:
./installhtml \
--podroot=. \
--podpath=lib:ext:pod:vms \
--recurse \
--htmldir=/perl/nmanual \
--htmlroot=/perl/nmanual \
--splithead=pod/perlipc \
--splititem=pod/perlfunc \
--libpods=perlfunc:perlguts:perlvar:perlrun:perlop \
--verbose
See the documentation in installhtml for more details. It can take
many minutes to execute a large installation and you should expect to
see warnings like "no title", "unexpected directive" and "cannot
resolve" as the files are processed. We are aware of these problems
(and would welcome patches for them).
You may find it helpful to run installhtml twice. That should reduce
the number of "cannot resolve" warnings.
=head1 cd pod && make tex && (process the latex files)
Some sites may also wish to make the documentation in the pod/ directory
available in TeX format. Type
(cd pod && make tex && )
=head1 Minimizing the Perl installation
The following section is meant for people worrying about squeezing the
Perl installation into minimal systems (for example when installing
operating systems, or in really small filesystems).
Leaving out as many extensions as possible is an obvious way:
Encode, with its big conversion tables, consumes a lot of
space. On the other hand, you cannot throw away everything. The
Fcntl module is pretty essential. If you need to do network
programming, you'll appreciate the Socket module, and so forth: it all
depends on what do you need to do.
In the following we offer two different slimmed down installation
recipes. They are informative, not normative: the choice of files
depends on what you need.
Firstly, the bare minimum to run this script
use strict;
use warnings;
foreach my $f () {
print("$f\n");
}
in Solaris is as follows (under $Config{prefix}):
./bin/perl
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/sun4-solaris-64int/auto/DynaLoader/autosplit.ix
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/sun4-solaris-64int/auto/DynaLoader/dl_expandspec.al
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/sun4-solaris-64int/auto/DynaLoader/dl_find_symbol_anywhere.al
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/sun4-solaris-64int/auto/DynaLoader/dl_findfile.al
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/sun4-solaris-64int/auto/File/Glob/Glob.so
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/sun4-solaris-64int/auto/File/Glob/autosplit.ix
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/sun4-solaris-64int/Config.pm
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/sun4-solaris-64int/XSLoader.pm
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/sun4-solaris-64int/DynaLoader.pm
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/sun4-solaris-64int/CORE/libperl.so
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/strict.pm
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/warnings.pm
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/Carp.pm
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/Exporter.pm
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/File/Glob.pm
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/AutoLoader.pm
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/vars.pm
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/warnings/register.pm
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/Carp/Heavy.pm
./lib/perl5/5.6.1/Exporter/Heavy.pm
Secondly, Debian perl-base package contains the following files,
size about 1.2MB in its i386 version:
/usr/share/doc/perl/Documentation
/usr/share/doc/perl/README.Debian
/usr/share/doc/perl/copyright
/usr/share/doc/perl/AUTHORS.gz
/usr/share/doc/perl/changelog.Debian.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/perl.1.gz
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/AutoLoader.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/Carp.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/Carp/Heavy.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/Cwd.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/Exporter.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/Exporter/Heavy.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/File/Spec.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/File/Spec/Unix.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/FileHandle.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/Getopt/Long.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/IO/Socket/INET.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/IO/Socket/UNIX.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/IPC/Open2.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/IPC/Open3.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/SelectSaver.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/Symbol.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/Text/Tabs.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/Text/Wrap.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/attributes.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/auto/Getopt/Long/GetOptions.al
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/auto/Getopt/Long/FindOption.al
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/auto/Getopt/Long/Configure.al
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/auto/Getopt/Long/config.al
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/auto/Getopt/Long/Croak.al
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/auto/Getopt/Long/autosplit.ix
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/base.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/constant.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/fields.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/integer.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/lib.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/locale.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/overload.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/strict.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/vars.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/warnings.pm
/usr/share/perl/5.6.1/warnings/register.pm
/usr/bin/perl
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/Config.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/Data/Dumper.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/DynaLoader.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/Errno.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/Fcntl.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/File/Glob.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/IO.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/IO/File.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/IO/Handle.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/IO/Pipe.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/IO/Seekable.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/IO/Select.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/IO/Socket.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/POSIX.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/Socket.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/XSLoader.pm
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/Data/Dumper/Dumper.so
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/Data/Dumper/Dumper.bs
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/DynaLoader/dl_findfile.al
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/DynaLoader/dl_expandspec.al
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/DynaLoader/dl_find_symbol_anywhere.al
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/DynaLoader/autosplit.ix
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/DynaLoader/DynaLoader.a
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/DynaLoader/extralibs.ld
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/Fcntl/Fcntl.so
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/Fcntl/Fcntl.bs
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/File/Glob/Glob.bs
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/File/Glob/Glob.so
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/File/Glob/autosplit.ix
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/IO/IO.so
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/IO/IO.bs
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/POSIX/POSIX.bs
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/POSIX/POSIX.so
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/POSIX/autosplit.ix
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/POSIX/load_imports.al
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/Socket/Socket.so
/usr/lib/perl/5.6.1/auto/Socket/Socket.bs
=head1 Reporting Problems
If you have difficulty building perl, and none of the advice in this file
helps, and careful reading of the error message and the relevant manual
pages on your system doesn't help either, then you should send a message
to either the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup or to perlbug@perl.org with
an accurate description of your problem.
Please include the output of the ./myconfig shell script that comes with
the distribution. Alternatively, you can use the perlbug program that
comes with the perl distribution, but you need to have perl compiled
before you can use it. (If you have not installed it yet, you need to
run C<./perl -Ilib utils/perlbug> instead of a plain C.)
Please try to make your message brief but clear. Trim out unnecessary
information. Do not include large files (such as config.sh or a complete
Configure or make log) unless absolutely necessary. Do not include a
complete transcript of your build session. Just include the failing
commands, the relevant error messages, and whatever preceding commands
are necessary to give the appropriate context. Plain text should
usually be sufficient--fancy attachments or encodings may actually
reduce the number of people who read your message. Your message
will get relayed to over 400 subscribers around the world so please
try to keep it brief but clear.
=head1 DOCUMENTATION
Read the manual entries before running perl. The main documentation
is in the pod/ subdirectory and should have been installed during the
build process. Type B to get started. Alternatively, you
can type B to use the supplied perldoc script. This is
sometimes useful for finding things in the library modules.
Under UNIX, you can produce a documentation book in postscript form,
along with its table of contents, by going to the pod/ subdirectory and
running (either):
./roffitall -groff # If you have GNU groff installed
./roffitall -psroff # If you have psroff
This will leave you with two postscript files ready to be printed.
(You may need to fix the roffitall command to use your local troff
set-up.)
Note that you must have performed the installation already before running
the above, since the script collects the installed files to generate
the documentation.
=head1 AUTHOR
Original author: Andy Dougherty doughera@lafayette.edu , borrowing very
heavily from the original README by Larry Wall, with lots of helpful
feedback and additions from the perl5-porters@perl.org folks.
If you have problems, corrections, or questions, please see
L<"Reporting Problems"> above.
=head1 REDISTRIBUTION
This document is part of the Perl package and may be distributed under
the same terms as perl itself, with the following additional request:
If you are distributing a modified version of perl (perhaps as part of
a larger package) please B modify these installation instructions
and the contact information to match your distribution.