Installing PERL

Perl is used a lot, and still has native support for OpenVMS which is nice.  There's also a dedicated OpenVMS Perl maintainer/volunteer that makes installable PCSI images available here.

The latest version of Perl source for compiling can be downloaded from here.  Look for the Unix source download.  I installed version 5.28.1.

The Perl source comes in *.tar.gz or *.tgz format so I used gzip to ungzip it, and then vmstar to untar it as follows:

$ gunzip *.gz
$ vmstar -xf perl-5^.28^.1.tar

This will result in the folder [.PERL-5_28_1] being created and ready for compilation.

Compilation and installation is pretty straight forward (but takes a while), instructions can be found in readme.vms.  Essentially it's:

@configure
mmk
mmk test
mmk install

however the configure script asks a lot of questions, and I've previously found its easier to run:

@configure "-des"

which chooses defaults for almost everything and seems to work fine on OpenVMS.

I have more recently started trying to tweak the configuration options and currently am running the following non-default options:

Try to use 64-bit integers? y
Try to use maximal 64-bit support? y
Try to use long doubles? y
Make unlink() delete all versions? y
Any additional cc flags? /OPT=(TUNE=HOST)
Installation prefix? SYS$COMMON:[PERL-5_28_1]
use the malloc that comes with perl 5? y

MMS apparently does not work, you have to use MMK.

There's a lot of tests (there's a lot of Perl!) so it takes a long time for them all to run.  It is worth running them though to ensure that the compilation has been successful and reduce the likelihood it is the source of other open source compilation problems.

On the most recent run, I ended up with 28 tests out of 2367 that failed.

Once installed, add the following line to SYLOGIN.COM:

$ @SYS$COMMON:[PERL-5_28]PERL_SETUP.COM