Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

When you port a package to Gentoo, the “normal” course of action - and the one that I teach when I’m mentoring - is to do what upstream does as closely as possible. But for the 2X Linux Terminal Server, I’m thinking of breaking that advice, just this once.

I have the bundled copy of Perl building, but I’m not sure it’s practical to use it. We’ll basically end up duplicating dev-lang/perl, and that’s more maintenance than I can take on.

The only reason I can think of for using the bundled Perl is that the perlcc installed as part of our “system” Perl 5.8.8 is currently broken. It can’t compile nxnode (I haven’t managed to try nxserver yet); when you try, it reports that it can’t resolve POSIX::SIGHUP et al. I knocked up a tiny test script to print POSIX:SIGHUP, and that works fine when run via the Perl interpreter. Try to compile it, however, and perlcc segfaults.

My knowledge of Perl is not what it used to be, but for the moment, my take on it is that we can’t rely on perlcc. But, do we need to?

Now that the code is GPL’d, I’m wondering if there is any practical reason to compile these scripts any more? (Raphael or any Perl wizards - can you think of a reason why we still need to compile these scripts?)

Unless there’s a compelling reason otherwise, I think the way forward is to patch server/nxnode to create and install normal Perl scripts to be interpreted by the “system” copy of Perl. That’s what I’m going to work on this week, unless someone can point out why it’s a bad idea.