[LEDE-DEV] Updating Perl to 5.26.1

[Philip Prindeville]

> On Sep 28, 2017, at 4:04 PM, Russell Senior <russell at personaltelco.net> wrote:
> 
>>>>>> "Philip" == Philip Prindeville <philipp_subx at redfish-solutions.com> writes:
> 
> Philip> Hi.  I’m trying to update Perl from 5.24.1 to 5.26.1 but running
> Philip> into some issues.
> 
> Philip> We don’t use ./Configure to build the target versions (just the
> Philip> host version), so when new settings are added, we need to figure
> Philip> out what they are… and what the appropriate settings are for all
> Philip> processors.
> 
> Philip> And word is from upstream that 5.28.1 will have even more stuff
> Philip> that we need to add to get it to build.
> 
> Philip> Wondering if there isn’t an easier way to figure out
> Philip> automatically what those settings should be.
> 
> Philip> Obviously we can’t compile and run for other platforms, but we
> Philip> can compile and extract information from those images (with
> Philip> objdump, nm, etc).
> 
> Philip> A lot of the tests that get run during Configure (grep ‘$run
> Philip> ./try’ Configure) are run just to dump out information about the
> Philip> result of compilation… most of which could also be extracted
> Philip> just by examining the generated object (such as with objdump
> Philip> -d).
> 
> Philip> Anyone have any suggestions for things we can try to make
> Philip> ./Configure work for cross-compiles as well?
> 
> Philip> Because doing version updates seems to involve a fair amount of
> Philip> guesswork about what the correct values are for a whole gamut of
> Philip> platforms, and this seems error-prone.
> 
> A long time ago, I tracked down a bug in the perl builds on a brcm47xx
> device by installing a native toolchain in an nfs-mounted rootfs and,
> over about 24 hours, running the auto configuration script on the target
> device.
> 
> I have no idea if the situation has improved since then, maybe 10 years
> ago.
> 


That sounds about as fun as spinning up a Qemu in the makefile and running configure inside that…

-Philip