Notes on Perl on the Hurd Last Updated: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 16:07:59 +0100 Written by: Mark Kettenis If you want to use Perl on the Hurd, I recommend using the Debian GNU/Hurd distribution (see http://www.debian.org), even if an official, stable release has not yet been made. The old `gnu-0.2' binary distribution will most certainly have additional problems. * Known Problems The Perl testsuite may still report some errors on the Hurd. The `lib/anydbm.t' and `op/stat.t' tests will most certainly fail. The first fails because Berkeley DB 2 does not allow empty keys and the test tries to use them anyway. This is not really a Hurd bug. The same test fails on Linux with version 2.1 of the GNU C Library. The second failure is caused by a bug in the Hurd's filesystem servers, that we have not been able to fix yet. I don't think it is crucial. The socket tests may fail if the network is not configured. You have to make `/hurd/pfinet' the translator for `/servers/socket/2', giving it the right arguments. Try `/hurd/pfinet --help' for more information. Here are the statistics for Perl 5.005_03 on my system: Failed Test Status Wstat Total Fail Failed List of failed ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- lib/anydbm.t 12 1 8.33% 12 op/stat.t 58 1 1.72% 4 5 tests skipped, plus 14 subtests skipped. Failed 2/189 test scripts, 98.94% okay. 2/6669 subtests failed, 99.97% okay. There are quite a few systems out there that do worse! However, since I am running a very recent Hurd snapshot, in which a lot of bugs that were exposed by the Perl testsuite have been fixed, you may encounter more failures. Likely candidates are: `lib/io_pipe.t', `lib/io_sock.t', `lib/io_udp.t' and `lib/time.t'.