Perl-5.8.0 for OS/2
===================

This binary distribution of Perl 5.8.0 is divided into five packages:

	- Perl-5.8.0-bin.zip		Perl OMF binaries
	- Perl-5.8.0-aout-bin.zip	Perl aout binaries (forkable)
	- Perl-5.8.0-core.zip		Perl modules and utility scripts
	- Perl-5.8.0-doc.zip		Perl 5.8.0 documentation in .inf format
	- Perl-5.8.0-man.zip		Perl 5.8.0 documentation in manpage format

The minimum required is either bin package and the core.

This is the stable version resulting from the 5.7.x series and replaces them. The previous stable
release was 5.6.x. Perl now uses the odd (development) and even (stable) numbering system.


INSTALLATION
============

You can safely unzip it over an existing installation. The binaries are in the Perl\bin\5.8.0
subdirectory so as not to overwrite those you might now have in Perl\bin from a previous release. If you
already have a perl.lib and/or perl.a in Perl\lib, however, they will get overwritten so you might want
to move them out of the way first.

Set the Perl environment variables, the most important of which is PERL_LIBPATH. Its format is
build/path; install\path. For example:

set PERL_LIBBATH = L:/Perl/lib; X:\Perl\lib;

where X is the drive on which you install Perl. This can be done either in config.sys or at a command
prompt. You should also add Perl\bin to PATH and Perl\lib to LIBPATH if it's not there already; or
Perl\bin\5.8.0 to PATH if you don't move the contents of 5.8.0 up into bin.

For the other optional environment variables, see the OS/2 section of the documentation.

Finally, run testperl.cmd to check your installation.

If you intend to install CPAN modules that require compilation, edit Config.pm to match your own build
environment. Otherwise it reflects mine, which is really not what you want.


NEAPOLITAN PERL/2
=================

This Perl comes in three flavors:

perl.exe	OMF build that uses a swarm of DLLs but can't fork
perl_.exe	Statically linked aout version, forkable
perlPM.exe	A stub for running Perl scripts that create PM (non-VIO) windows


WHAT'S NEW
==========

This release is built with -DDEBUGGING so that the -D switches work (almost). The caveat stems from
hitting an infamous "virtual memory exhausted" gcc crash while compiling toke.c; therefore that one
module is compiled without -DDEBUGGING, so tokenizing output blanks are highly likely, if not
guaranteed. But I felt turning on this feature (which I've only read about because previous OS/2
releases were never built with it) was worth that limitation. To my surprise, -Dt (debug tokenizing)
doesn't crash. Anyhow, consider this entirely experimental.


TEST RESULTS
============

perl.exe:
All tests successful, 53 tests and 426 subtests skipped.
Files=726, Tests=68852

perl_.exe:
All tests successful, 55 tests and 415 subtests skipped.
Files=726, Tests=68395

Purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...


h~
Henry Sobotka <sobotka@axess.com>
Dundee, Quebec
2003/02/23

