[Info-vax] Building Perl on VAX

[Craig A. Berry]

On 7/12/19 4:34 AM, Daniel Sundqvist wrote:
>> Use DCL for your CGI.  Or build and use Perl prior to 5.22.  Or use
>> some other language.  Or see the previously-referenced link to the
>> description of what was changed and what was removed at Perl 5.22—when
>> OpenVMS VAX support was removed—and retrofit that, if you really want
>> to build and use 5.22.  You'll learn a whole lot about computing from
>> the last millennium here, too.
> 

> Actually I think that the changes you posted was not merged into the
> 5.22 branch. This is from the 5.24.0 release notes:
> 
> The minimum supported version of VMS is now v7.3-2, released in 2003.
> As a side effect of this change, VAX is no longer supported as the
> terminal release of OpenVMS VAX was v7.3 in 2001.
> 
> So it seem 5.24.0 is the first release without VAX support.

Right.  The changes posted for 5.22.x would still have been eligible for
application to the 5.22 maint branch up until the release of 5.26.0, but
only if they had been reported by filing a ticket against Perl or at
least posting to the vmsperl mailing list.  I don't frequent the
hobbyist forum and I think it's safe to say none of the other Perl
maintainers does either.

> I'm building 5.22.4 right now. Successfully build miniperl.exe and is
> now building the modules. Takes quite a while... We'll se if it's
> successful all the way.

It took several days to do a build on my SIMH instance the last time I
tried some years ago.  This was another reason to deprecate VAX; it has
lots of special requirements and takes lots of extra effort to work
around all the limitations, but it also takes forever to test the
special changes necessary to keep it running.  No one had been doing
that work for quite some time when 5.22 was current, so it's
unsurprising it doesn't work out of the box.