Perl 5.8.0 cannot be built in AmigaOS. You can use either the
maintenance release Perl 5.6.1 or the development release Perl 5.7.2
in AmigaOS. See PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOSif you want to help
fixing this problem.
You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most important part is
ixemul.library. For a minimum setup, get the latest versions
of the following packages from the Aminet archives
( http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/ ):
ixemul-bin
ixemul-env-bin
pdksh-bin
Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might want to add other
packages of ADE (the Amiga Developers Environment).
Start your Perl program foo with arguments arg1 arg2 arg3 the
same way as on any other platform, by
perl foo arg1 arg2 arg3
If you want to specify perl options -my_opts to the perl itself (as
opposed to your program), use
perl -my_opts foo arg1 arg2 arg3
Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the system's Execute
command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syntax in scripts and set the s-Bit
of your scripts. Then you can invoke your scripts like under UNIX with
foo arg1 arg2 arg3
(Note that having *nixish full path to perl /usr/bin/perl is not
necessary, perl would be enough, but having full path would make it
easier to use your script under *nix.)
to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with
man perl
Note: You have to modify your man.conf file to search for manpages
in the /ade/lib/perl5/man/man3 directory, or the man pages for the
perl library will not be found.
Note that dot (.) is used as a package separator for documentation
for packages, and as usual, sometimes you need to give the section - 3
above - to avoid shadowing by the less(1) manpage.
Users of Emacs would appreciate it very much, especially with
CPerl mode loaded. You need to get latest pod2info from CPAN,
or, alternately, prebuilt info pages.
You will see a message about errors while extracting Configure. This
is normal and expected. (There is a conflict with a similarly-named file
configure, but it causes no harm.)
As told above, Perl 5.6.1 was still good in AmigaOS, as was 5.7.2.
After Perl 5.7.2 (change #11423, see the Changes file, and the file
pod/perlhack.pod for how to get the individual changes) Perl dropped
its internal support for vfork(), and that was very probably the step
that broke AmigaOS (since the ixemul library has only vfork).
The build finally fails when the ext/DynaLoader is being built, and
PERL ends up as ``0'' in the produced Makefile, trying to run ``0'' does
not quite work. Also, executing miniperl in backticks seems to
generate nothing: very probably related to the (v)fork problems.
Fixing the breakage requires someone quite familiar with the ixemul
library, and how one is supposed to run external commands in AmigaOS
without fork().
