Mac Forum / Programming / Perl / July 2005

With a hint from Jarkko I got 5.4.5 to build on OS X.  Here's how.

Step one:  Copy hints/darwin.sh from 5.5.4.  I chose 5.5.4 because its the
closest to 5.4.5 and yet still modern.

Step two:  Fix the version discovery handling in the hints file.  The 5.5.4
version looks for things like perl_revision and perl_version in patchlevel.h
but 5.4.5 has simply patchlevel and subversion.

Step three:  Comment out the dlsrc choice of dl_dyld.xs.  5.4.5 doesn't
have that.  Let it use the default, it seems to work.

Step four:  Comment out the UU/archname.cbu generation.  That stuff doesn't
exist in 5.4.5.

(Attached is a patch which does all this)

Step five:  Run Configure and "make depend" normally.

Step six:  "make" will bomb out complaining about
"*** No rule to make target `<built-in>', needed by `miniperlmain.o'."
This is "make depend" not knowing about certain GNUisms.  You'll have to
strip them out of the GNUmakefile and x2p/GNUmakefile.

 perl -i.bak -ne 'print unless /<(built-in|command line)>/' GNUmakefile x2p/GNUmakefile

Step seven:  make, make test and make install.  Bits of t/lib/db-recno.t will
fail but that's expected.