Perl portability

rinceWind has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks,

With a view to preparing a talk on writing portable perl code, I am looking for references and documentation.

This name about due to my looking to use a well liked CPAN module bundle (which I shall not name to save embarrassing the author) on VMS. This failed the install completely, and also has problems with a Windows platform.

perlport looks good and seems to cover all the bases
Thread portability! is relevant with some good points.

Anyone know of any good chapters in Perl books covering this?

Not wishing to bother the guys on p5p to interrupt the excellent work they are doing, does anyone know if they work to a checklist? Is this published anywhere? Is this any different from perlport?

--rW

Comment on Perl portability

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Re: Perl portability by busunsl (Vicar) on Feb 15, 2002 at 12:37 UTC
Perl for System Administration (O'Reilly) covers Unix and Win32, you should find lots of material here. Learning Perl on Win32 Systems (O'Reilly) might be worth a look too.	[reply]
Re: Perl portability by Dog and Pony (Priest) on Feb 15, 2002 at 12:17 UTC
I found this book via Google, don't know if it is any good though. It however gets a good review at Camel Critiques, which should say something.	[reply]
Re: Perl portability by chromatic (Archbishop) on Feb 15, 2002 at 17:08 UTC
Anything that directly interfaces with the system can cause problems. I generally run into trouble with sort on EBCDIC platforms, though file paths are another source of trouble. VMS files are just odd (especially with revisions). I usually write my files and find someone who can test them on other platforms. If you sign up for a Compaq Testdrive account, you can run tests on several different platforms. They've been really good to Perl QA.	[reply]
Re: Perl portability by Buggs (Acolyte) on Feb 16, 2002 at 01:59 UTC
thinking porting itslef is something that can't be done without testing, a module might help but cannot cover every aspect. Me too recommends Compaq's testdrive :) Porting threads, which are nearly impossible to implement afterwards when not designed in from start, as Dan Sugalski says, will be a none trivial thing. Since thread stabilty is very dependant on the platform, i'd stay away from doing stuff with them that got to be portable. I'd rather go with fork(). But me always does that, coming from UNIX, so i am sure i am biased ;)	[reply]