[Info-vax] Perl (for OpenSSL) v. me

[Steven Schweda]

>    I'll give that a try (and report back).

   Manually installing the Text::Template kit worked well enough.

   The new OpenSSL configuration process failed pretty miserably,
however.  Apparently, abs2rel() isn't doing anything useful on VMS. 
Below is a reduced script which shows some absolute paths and some
relative paths derived from the absolute paths.  Compare the results on
a handy Mac with the same thing on VMS:

mba$ perl --version

This is perl 5, version 18, subversion 2 (v5.18.2) built for
 darwin-thread-multi-2level
[...]

alp $ perl --version

This is perl 5, version 22, subversion 1 (v5.22.1) built for VMS_AXP
[...]

mba$ cat ../os.pl
use strict;
use File::Basename;
use File::Spec::Functions qw/:DEFAULT abs2rel rel2abs catpath splitpath/;
use Cwd qw/:DEFAULT realpath/;

my $srcdir = catdir(realpath(dirname($0)));
my $blddir = catdir(realpath("."));
my $dofile = abs2rel(catfile($srcdir, "util/dofile.pl"));

my $srcdir_rel = abs2rel($srcdir);
my $blddir_rel = abs2rel($blddir);
my $dofile_rel = abs2rel($dofile);

print "srcdir: $srcdir\n";
print "blddir: $blddir\n";
print "dofile: $dofile\n";

print "srcdir_rel: $srcdir_rel\n";
print "blddir_rel: $blddir_rel\n";
print "dofile_rel: $dofile_rel\n";
mba$ 

   Results:

mba$ perl ../os.pl
srcdir: /Users/sms
blddir: /Users/sms/itrc
dofile: ../util/dofile.pl
srcdir_rel: ..
blddir_rel: .
dofile_rel: ../util/dofile.pl

alp $ perl ../os.pl             ! ("[-]os.pl" works the same.)
srcdir: DISK$VMS083ALP:[SMS]
blddir: DISK$VMS083ALP:[SMS.itrc]
dofile: DISK$VMS083ALP:[SMS.util]dofile.pl
srcdir_rel: DISK$VMS083ALP:[SMS]
blddir_rel: DISK$VMS083ALP:[SMS.itrc]
dofile_rel: DISK$VMS083ALP:[SMS.util]dofile.pl

   The relative paths on the UNIX-like system look ok, but these
not-very-relative-looking VMS paths get fiddled with further, and 
end up transformed into completely fictional stuff which thoroughly
fouls the OpenSSL configuration stuff.  M. Levitte suggests that Perl
5.10.1 worked for someone on VMS.  I haven't tried anything older than
5.22.1, so I know nothing.  Knowing nothing, I can't say that the Perl
code actually makes sense, but if abs2rel() is supposed to do more than
nothing, then something's wrong here.