Perl-5.8.4

The Perl package contains the Practical Extraction and Report Language.

Approximate build time:  0.8 SBU
Required disk space:     74 MB

Perl installation depends on: Bash, Binutils, Coreutils, Diffutils, Gawk, GCC, Glibc, Grep, Make, Sed.

Installation of Perl

First adapt some hard-wired paths to the C library:

patch -Np1 -i ../perl-5.8.4-libc-1.patch

Perl insists on using the arch program to find out the machine type. Create a little script to mimic this command:

echo "uname -m" > /tools/bin/arch
chmod 755 /tools/bin/arch

Now prepare Perl for compilation (make sure you get the 'IO Fcntl POSIX' right, they are all letters):

./configure.gnu --prefix=/tools -Dstatic_ext='IO Fcntl POSIX'

The meaning of the configure option:

  • -Dstatic_ext='IO Fcntl POSIX': This tells Perl to build the minimum set of static extensions needed for installing and testing the Coreutils package in the next chapter.

Compile only the required tools:

make perl utilities

Then copy these tools and their libraries:

cp perl pod/pod2man /tools/bin
mkdir -p /tools/lib/perl5/5.8.4
cp -R lib/* /tools/lib/perl5/5.8.4

The details on this package are found in the section called “Contents of Perl”.