On Sat, 2 Nov 2002, Brian Chase wrote:

> Has anyone here attempted to build the `lang/perl5' (Perl 5.6.1) package
> from the 1.6 release on thier VAX?  I've just run through the first
> attempt on my MicroVAX 3100 and its errored out in the install phase
> while generating the perl man pages.  I'm working on regenerating the
> error.

Okay, getting back to the original problem after the diversion with
`make test' and the "NaN".  I don't believe those issues are related to
the package not bulding for me.

Rerunning the make install on the package, I get the following:

  LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/u0/usr/pkgsrc/lang/perl5/work/perl-5.6.1 ./perl installman
    /usr/pkg/man/man1/perl.1
    /usr/pkg/man/man1/perl5004delta.1
    /usr/pkg/man/man1/perl5005delta.1
    ...
    /usr/pkg/man/man1/perlhist.1
    /usr/pkg/man/man1/perlintern.1
    /usr/pkg/man/man1/perlipc.1
  Attempt to free unreferenced scalar at installman line 210.
  Attempt to free unreferenced scalar at installman line 163.
  Attempt to free unreferenced scalar at installman line 163.
  Segmentation fault - core dumped
  *** Error code 139

  Stop.

And when I ran it again, I got a slightly different error...

    /usr/pkg/man/man1/perlhist.1
    /usr/pkg/man/man1/perlintern.1
    /usr/pkg/man/man1/perlipc.1
  perl in free(): warning: modified (chunk-) pointer.
  perl in free(): warning: modified (chunk-) pointer.
  Attempt to free unreferenced scalar at installman line 163.
  Segmentation fault - core dumped
  *** Error code 139

  Stop.

If I remember correctly, the previous time I tried this, the installman
script failed in a still different way.  There's nothing at those lines
in the installman script that looks suspect, and I really wouldn't
expect there to be Perl coding bugs with the scripts that are bundled
with the Perl distribution.  Is the Perl garbage collector running
amuck?

So... I looked more carefully through the installman script.  By
default, it batches up the pod2man translations of the perl man pages
into groups of 40.  Each lot of 40 takes quite a long time to process.
Not being able to come up with any sensible reason for the failure, I
guessed that may it had something to do with the length of time it took
to process the batches of man pages, or maybe it had to do with the
number of files involved?  I decided to tweak the batch size, dropping
it to processing 5 files with each iteration of pod2man translations.
Rerunning the `make install' following this change resulted in the
install successfully reaching completion.

That's a bit spooky.

-brian.