MS/Solaris installation buglets

[David Lee]

On Fri, 8 Feb 2008, Julian Field wrote:

> David Lee wrote:
> > Julian: to report a couple of Solaris MS (4.66.5) installation buglets.
> >
> > 1. MakeMaker requires a release of File::Spec which may be more recent
> >    than that native in the OS.  You already distribute a good File::Spec.
> >
> >    Solution: Re-order the installation to do File::Spec before MakeMaker.
> >    (Tested: it works.)
> >
> Done. Will be in the next release.

(Sorry for delay in replying.  Various delays on site...)

Many thanks for File::Spec.


> > 2. MakeMaker build reports "Can't locate Pod/Man.pm in @INC...".  Might
> >    these need something like "Pod::Man" adding to the list of modules you
> >    distribute?
> >
> This is a bigger problem. They don't distribute Pod::Man as a standalone
> module unfortunately. Is it vital?

Executive summary: this turns out to be the thin end of a fat wedge.
Playing with wedge isn't going to scale well.  So at the end of this
email I propose a simple solution.


Some detail:

Don't know about Pod::Man.  I decided to stop at that point, so that I
could investigate more systematically... which I have just begun...

I was trying this on Solaris 8 (yes, relatively old), whose native perl is
"5.005_03" (yes, even older!)  All sorts of other things started crawling
out of the woodwork.  Given those ages, I decided to abandon S8.

Just trying Solaris-9, whose native perl seems to be "5.6.1".  This is
better, but still has woes:
o  Pod-Simple: failed some tests; seems to fail to install
o  Test-Pod: fails to build; many "Can't locate Test/More.pm in @INC ..."
   (presumably a result of "Pod-Simple") failure;
o  MailTools-2.02: fails:
      Perl v5.8.1 required--this is only v5.6.1 [...]
o  IO-1.2301: fails:
      IO.xs:138: parse error before `pos'

And I suspect it would continue in this vein.

I kow the installation procedure says not to worry too much ("the
important ones are HTML-Parser and MIME-tools").  But is the above rate of
failure really going to be OK?


Jules: From your support perspective, might it simply be time to draw a
line, and to do a very early test in 'install.sh' of the form:

   if perl < 5.8.1 then abandon any attempt to build

In Solaris, that would imply either:
o  only working on S10 (and above) with native perl, or:
o  the end-user neeeding their own 5.8.1 (or above) perl.


-- 

:  David Lee                                I.T. Service          :
:  Senior Systems Programmer                Computer Centre       :
:  UNIX Team Leader                         Durham University     :
:                                           South Road            :
:  http://www.dur.ac.uk/t.d.lee/            Durham DH1 3LE        :
:  Phone: +44 191 334 2752                  U.K.                  :