All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Perl 5.005_03 failures

djberg96 on 2003-04-03T03:33:19

Well, I received another email regarding Net::SCP::Expect, this one relaying a problem with using the glob operator. According to the email, running this script caused Perl 5.005_03 to dump core: #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use Net::SCP::Expect;

my $dir = '/home/testdata'; my @ok_files = glob "$dir/*.xml";

print join("\n",@ok_files); I'm guessing this is an Expect.pm issue. I couldn't duplicate this with Perl 5.8, so I tried installing Perl 5.005_03. Unfortunately I get a bizarre make error after a (apparently) successful configure:

make: *** No rule to make target `<built-in>', needed by `miniperlmain.o'. Stop.
It seems that once upon a time, I used to know what caused this. If I did, I've forgotten now and Google yields precious little.

Any ideas?

Update: rafael pointed me to a patch that worked like a charm - thanks rafael!. So, Perl 5.005_03 is installed. On to the core dump part...

Known problem probably

rafael on 2003-04-03T07:19:09

I don't identify your particular failure, but the keywords would be makedepend and miniperlmain. You're using gcc 3.x, don't you ?

Re:Known problem probably

rafael on 2003-04-03T07:28:38

Or : you forgot to escape the <...> when pasting your error message.
Try this patch against 5.005_03. And build your perl with LC_ALL=C. HTH.

Re:Known problem probably

djberg96 on 2003-04-04T04:05:31

Yeah, I forgot to escape the > and <. In any case, I tried the patch and it worked. Thanks!

Back to the original problem

jdavidb on 2003-04-03T18:43:45

Ask your user to just use Expect; and see if it still dumps core. And recognize that it is almost certainly platform specific.

Re:Back to the original problem

djberg96 on 2003-04-04T15:38:30

Tried that, but the author claims it only happens with Net::SCP::Expect, and not just Expect. It's on Linux, which is what I have at home. Could it be a libexpect issue? I dunno.

Well, I'm about ready to give up testing with 5.005_03 anyway. See my next journal entry.

Re:Back to the original problem

jdavidb on 2003-04-04T16:50:36

Well, I'm about ready to give up testing with 5.005_03 anyway.

Hear, hear! I'm a little bit calloused, but I'm not interested in providing support for anything other than the latest version, anyway. I know some people are stuck with older versions. The software is free, let someone else make the necessary changes to make it work and submit them or maintain them himself.

There's something to be said for the OpenSSH release model. The base OpenSSH works only with OpenBSD. The core OpenSSH developers never have to worry about other platforms, and in fact could care less. Then there's the portable OpenSSH release; a group of committed developers take the time to port the regular OpenSSH releases and guarantee they run on a much wider variety of platforms. Seems to work well.