Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 17:43:12 +0000 From: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD 4.7 and buildkernel perl5 references Message-ID: <20030224174312.GB50266@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophi> In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.0.20030224110602.00adf8f8@pop.swbell.yahoo.com> References: <5.2.0.9.0.20030224110602.00adf8f8@pop.swbell.yahoo.com>
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On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 11:10:33AM -0600, Sean O'Neill wrote:
> Just curious if anyone knows why the kernel source has references to both
> "perl5" as well as "perl" and if work is being done to make make the calls
> to perl more standard e.g. using either "perl" or "perl5" everywhere.
>
> This isn't a problem but more of a one-time-annoyance. Right at the
> beginning of the buildkernel stuff, the make runs "perl5" on a couple of
> things. Further on it uses "perl" for other stuff.
It's historic. In two senses. The distinction between 'perl' and
'perl5' dates back to when perl-4.036 was being superceded by perl-5.x
and there were some incompatibilities that had to be smoothed over.
(Of course, nowadays, it's all perl5 anyhow, but the distinction might
as well remain to help disambiguate perl5 and the upcoming perl6...)
The other reason that it's historic is that perl has been stripped out
of the system sources in 5-CURRENT. This change is unlikely ever to
be backported to the 4-STABLE tree, but on the other hand, no one is
likely to put much effort into enhancing code that's slated for the
chop in a few months time anyhow.
> On my system, I removed all the old FreeBSD perl stuff. Apparently
> buildkernel doesn't include /usr/localb/bin as part of its path so it
> didn't find /usr/local/bin/perl5. Basically, it failed. Easy fix of
> simply adding a symlink of /usr/bin/perl5 to /usr/local/bin/perl.
Yeah --- I noticed that too. All it takes is installing one of the
perl ports, running 'use.perl port', creating the perl5 symlink you
mention, and you can compile with 'NO_PERL=yes' and delete all of the
system supplied perl-5.005.03 stuff. Unfortunately you need to keep
/usr/bin/perl5 as the original system perl binary if you want the
capability to switch back and forth between the system and port
versions of perl.
Cheers,
Matthew
--
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks
Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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