If you read this file _as_is_, just ignore the funny characters you see.
It is written in the POD format (see pod/perlpod.pod) which is specially
designed to be readable as is.

=head1 NAME

README.beos - Perl version 5 on BeOS

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Notes for building Perl under BeOS.

=head2 General Issues with Perl on BeOS

To compile perl under BeOS R4 x86:

	./Configure -d

and hit ^C when it asks you if you want to make changes to config.sh;
edit config.sh and do the following:
change d_socket='define' to ='undef';
remove SDBM, Errno, and Socket from dynamic_ext= and nonxs_ext=;
add '#define bool short' to x2p/a2p.h;

	../Configure -S; make; make install

	cd ~/config/lib; ln -s 5.00502/BeOS-BePC/CORE/libperl.so .

(substitute 5.00502 with the appropriate filename)

=head2 BeOS Release-specific Notes

=over 4

=item R4 x86

Dynamic loading finally works! Yay! This means you can compile your
own modules into perl. However, Sockets and Errno still don't work.
(Hopefully, sockets will at least work by R5, if not sooner.)

=item R4 PPC

I have not tested this. I rather severely doubt that dynamic loading
will work. (My BeBox is in pieces right now, following a nasty disk
crash.) You may have to disable dynamic loading to get the thing to
compile at all. (use `./Configure` without -d, and say 'no' to 'Build
a shared libperl.so'.)

=back

=head2 Contact Information

If you have comments, problem reports, or even patches or bugfixes (gasp!)
please email me.

28 Jan 1999
Tom Spindler
[email protected]

=head2 Update 2002-05-30

The following tests fail on 5.8.0 Perl in BeOS Personal 5.03:

 t/op/lfs............................FAILED at test 17
 t/op/magic..........................FAILED at test 24
 ext/Fcntl/t/syslfs..................FAILED at test 17
 ext/File/Glob/t/basic...............FAILED at test 3
 ext/POSIX/t/sigaction...............FAILED at test 13
 ext/POSIX/t/waitpid.................FAILED at test 1

The reasons for the failures are as follows: 

=over 4

=item *

The t/op/lfs and ext/Fcntl/t/syslfs failures indicate that the
LFS (large file support, files larger than 2 gigabytes) doesn't
work from Perl (BeFS itself is well capable of supporting large
files).  What fails is that trying to position the file pointer
past 2 gigabytes doesn't work right, the position gets truncated
to its lower 32 bits.

=item *

The op/magic failures look like something funny going on with $0 and
$^X that I can't now figure out: none of the generated pathnames are
wrong as such, they just seem to accumulate "./" prefixes and infixes
in ways that define logic.

=item *

The Glob/t/basic indicates a bug in the getpw*() functions:
they do not always return the correct user db entries.

=item *

The sigaction #13 means that signal mask doesn't get properly restored
if sigaction returns early.

=item *

The waitpid failure means that after there are no more child
processes, waitpid is supposed to start returning -1 (and set
errno to ECHILD).  In BeOS, it doesn't seem to.

=back

Disclaimer: I just installed BeOS Personal Edition 5.0 and the
Developer Tools, that is the whole extent of my BeOS expertise,
so please don't ask me for further help in BeOS Perl problems.

[email protected]