title: upgrading perl on solaris 8 link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/upgrading-perl-on-solaris-8/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 339 created: 2009/04/13 19:22:08 created_gmt: 2009/04/13 19:22:08 comment_status: open post_name: upgrading-perl-on-solaris-8 status: publish post_type: post

upgrading perl on solaris 8

Come on, admit it, you knew this was coming.

So I’ve gone ahead and upgraded perl to 5.10.0 on that Sun 220R back in the data center.

The previous version of perl was the 5.6.1 package from Sunfreeware, which in turn replaced the stock 5.005 that shipped with Solaris 8 when the O/S was upgraded from Solaris 7.

This time around, on the advice of my friend and colleague Richard Fernandez, I did a source install from the downloadable tarball on the perl.org site.

Before doing my “make install”, I backed up the perl* executables to obvious names like perl561. But I forgot to run autobundle. Argh.

It’s a good thing I backed them up too. Even though I actually ran the command as make install PERLNAME=perlnew to avoid overwriting the existing perl executables (like perl5.6.1). Silly me. It overwrote them anyway.

Immediately after installing I copied the backed up perl561 executable back to perl (and perl5.6.1), to avoid hosing any programs that might run before I was finished installing all the extra modules they needed.

I then began the painstaking task of reinstalling all those modules to the new version site_perl directory by going through the perlnew -MCPAN -e "install _ModuleName_” routine.

Most modules installed without a hitch. A few were a little more cantankerous. Like my favorites, DBD::Oracle and Net::SSLeahy (for IO::Socket::SSO support). The noncritical ones, those not being used in any existing scripts, got shifted to the bottom of the pile. This included most of those that require high end math or crypto functions. These still need to be revisited. Like Math::GMP. The GNU gmp library doesn’t look like it will be installing on Solaris 8 for Sparc 64 easily. But that’s another story.

Long and the short of it is that everything that was being used under 5.6.1 now seems to be working fine under 5.10.0, with one big exception. Internationalization support actually works now! Perl 5.8 and forward are light-years ahead of earlier version when it comes to handling Unicode, particularly encoding and decoding. Stuff now “just works”, instead of failing miserably and making me look bad.

Which is the true definition of a successful upgrade.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo