I've been going through the old "Perl building on AIX" bugs on rt. The standard answers have been approximately: The version of AIX you're using is not supported (AIX 5.3 goes out of support at the end of this month, 5.1 is already out of support). The version of Perl you're using is out of support. I've compiled Perl 5.14.2 on AIX 6 with xlC successfully. I've also compiled 5.14.0 on the same machine, but ended up with a few problems compiling other modules that I've not had with 5.14.2, not entirely sure why that is.

Given that perl 5.12 is about to be out of support with the imminent release of perl 5.16 (some time next month), I would suggest not bothering with 5.12, either.

Please tell your management that AIX 6.1 will be the oldest level of AIX still supported by IBM as of May 1. They should upgrade as soon as possible to ensure continued support. As for your perl question, I have every plan of using perl 5.16.1 in my next deliverable. Yes, 5.16.0 isn't out yet, but I need to plan ahead :-) I've watched p5p a bit lately due to other reasons (which is how I got dragged into this), and I have to say, as a general rule, always go with the latest available version at the time of the upgrade. (Exceptions have been made for releases like 5.8.0, 5.8.7, 5.10.0.) You'll get more bugfixes, and better support.

I say all this without having tried S::WE/S::PE.

I've also written a Configure wrapper that has helped me do the above testing - that way I don't have to sit through Configure's lengthy questions and can get the same results each time, modulo the extra options passed in. If you're going to test a bunch of versions, I recommend doing the same. I even cheat: my perlconfigure tool runs off the system perl. I use perl to configure perl :-). (Then again, I also have a wrapper written to select one of a number of perls, also written in perl, and then eval 'dev_perl -S $0 "$@"' [\n] if 0; selects the right perl automatically... so I kinda cheat all the time.)

Edit: And, yes, absolutely, do not touch the system perl. Install your new version elsewhere and use that.

In reply to Re: Installing Perl in AIX 5.1 by Tanktalus
in thread Installing Perl in AIX 5.1 by ratsinha

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.