5.32. Perl-5.8.7

The Perl package contains the Practical Extraction and Report Language.

Approximate build time: 0.8 SBU
Required disk space: 81.6 MB
Installation depends on: Bash, Binutils, Coreutils, Diffutils, Gawk, GCC, Glibc, Grep, Make, and Sed

5.32.1. Installation of Perl

First adapt some hard-wired paths to the C library by applying the following patch:

patch -Np1 -i ../perl-5.8.7-libc-1.patch

Prepare Perl for compilation (make sure to get the 'IO Fcntl POSIX' part of the command correct—they are all letters):

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

The meaning of the configure options:

-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.

Only a few of the utilities contained in this package need to be built:

make perl utilities

Although Perl comes with a test suite, it is not recommended to run it at this point. Only part of Perl was built and running make test now will cause the rest of Perl to be built as well, which is unnecessary at this point. The test suite can be run in the next chapter if desired.

Install these tools and their libraries:

cp -v perl pod/pod2man /tools/bin
mkdir -pv /tools/lib/perl5/5.8.7
cp -Rv lib/* /tools/lib/perl5/5.8.7

Details on this package are located in Section 6.33.2, “Contents of Perl.”