Re: Perl is required?

[Stephen L Moshier <moshier at mediaone dot net>]

On Wed, 19 Dec 2001, Joseph S. Myers wrote:

> On Wed, 19 Dec 2001, Stephen L Moshier wrote:
> 
> > Trying to build gcc on a sparc-solaris drew this failure.
> > Is perl a requirement now?  How do we know what version of perl will work?
> 
> We check in configure.in for an installation of perl with a suitable 
> version of Pod::Man.  Your problem seems to be that the pod2man in your 
> path corresponds to a different version of perl from that in your path, 
> and the perl installation found by your pod2man is broken.  Fix your 
> installation so that pod2man in your path comes from the same (working) 
> version of perl as perl in your path.

This theory of the problem is not supported by experiment.

There is only one pod2man in the path, and only one perl in the path.
They both mention the same perl version number.

The computer is not mine to break, it is part of a large workstation
farm.  I was able, however, to get the distribution of the exact same
perl version, perl5.004_04, and build it in my private login
directory.  I installed it locally, along with the 219 megabytes of
other bleeding edge versions of things that are required to construct
gcc-3.  The exact same bootstrap error occured with this locally
installed perl5.004_04.

On the other hand I have found that the latest perl distribution, perl
5.6.1, does work in the gcc bootstrap when I install it locally in my
private login directory.  So I think it is demonstrated that the
perl5.004_04 was installed correctly on the computer system but
nevertheless that version of perl does not work.  If you refuse to
make the build script work with perl5.004_04, then perhaps you should
make the configure script reject that version of perl.