Re: How To Downgrade Perl on Ubuntu

[Anonymous Monk]

I followed steps above exactly but got stuck with the following two test failures:

t/op/sprintf..............................FAILED--no leader found 
t/op/sprintf2.............................FAILED--expected 263 tests, 
+saw 3

The only thing done different on my box is the page.h location:

> ls -l /usr/include/asm/page.h 
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 52 2010-03-26 00:02 /usr/include/asm/page.h -> 
+/usr/local/rhel5.amd64/usr/include/asm-x86_64/page.h

And this is the file content:

> ~/Downloads/perl.downgrade/perl-5.8.8$ cat /usr/include/asm/page.h 
#ifndef _X86_64_PAGE_H
#define _X86_64_PAGE_H


#endif /* _X86_64_PAGE_H */

Does anybody have an idea why those tests fails and how to fix them? Thanks a bunch!

[Anonymous Monk]

I ran into exactly the same test case failures recently with RHEL 6 (2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64). So perhaps this is related to newer kernel or compilers? I'm using the RH RPM gcc distro (gcc version 4.4.4 20100726 (Red Hat 4.4.4-13) ) and kernel 2.6.32-71. My error is:

...
t/op/sprintf..............................FAILED--no leader found
t/op/sprintf2.............................FAILED--expected 263 tests, 
+saw 3
...
Failed 2 test scripts out of 931, 99.79% okay.

In my case, I utilized a standard RedHat patch from their Perl 5.8.8 devel RPM to address the asm/page.h issue. As per RHN 2006 change log, this "stop IPC/SysV.c including <asm/page.h> for getpagesize(), which is now declared by including <unistd.h>". The patch is (perl-5.8.8-no_asm_page_h.patch):

--- perl-5.8.8/ext/IPC/SysV/SysV.xs.no_asm_page_h    2001-06-30 14:46:
+07.000000000 -0400
+++ perl-5.8.8/ext/IPC/SysV/SysV.xs    2006-06-02 17:37:22.000000000 -
+0400
@@ -3,9 +3,6 @@
 #include "XSUB.h"
 
 #include <sys/types.h>
-#ifdef __linux__
-#   include <asm/page.h>
-#endif
 #if defined(HAS_MSG) || defined(HAS_SEM) || defined(HAS_SHM)
 #ifndef HAS_SEM
 #   include <sys/ipc.h>

On the original topic of downgrading Perl, specific to RHEL 6, I had to address new 64-bit default system library locations which are lib64 vs. lib. Specifically, I added this argument to Configure:

sh ./Configure ... -Dlibpth='/usr/local/lib64 /lib64 /usr/lib64'

This path problem is discussed in this thread: http://osdir.com/ml/lang.perl.perl5.porters/2006-01/msg01037.html

Anyway, any insight on the failed test issue would be much appreciated.