building a dynamically linked Perl 5.6.1 on HPUX 11.0

[Michael Schuh]

Greetings all,

I recently (like, 40 minutes ago) installed Perl 5.6.1 on an HPUX 11.0 system.  
As my goal is to interact with an Oracle database, I followed Lincoln Baxter's 
README.hpux (THANK YOU!) and tried to build a dynamically linked version of 
Perl.  However, in earlier attempts (stretching back over the last week or so) 
it died in the linking stage, admonishing me that a file was created without 
position independent code and advising me that I should recompile using the 
"+z" flag.  As I was using gcc (which has no +z flag) this was very confusing 
until I noticed that the file to which the message was referring was libgdbm, 
which I had built just last week, and realized that I was using HPUX's ld ('cuz 
the GNU binutils ld won't work on HPUX) and this ld doesn't know about gcc.

Well, it was simple enough to fix: go back to the libgdm build and add -fPIC to 
the complier options.  After that, Perl built and loaded just like the 
documentation says it should.

My "bug"?  It would have helped me, I think, if the three sets of documentation 
were more blatant about building everything PIC.  The configure/build process 
for libgdbm does not have an obvious method to specify PIC, and neither the 
Perl documentation nor Lincoln Baxter's README.hpux remind the user that all 
files in a dynamic build need to be PIC.  Yes, it's "well known" (and, if I had 
been asked, would have said as much...), but a mild reminder might have helped 
me.

Also, in the Makefile for libgdbm:

30c30
< CFLAGS = -O -fPIC
---
> CFLAGS = -O  

although this is specific to gcc.

As is often the case in the software biz, just a few characters can make all 
the difference.

Thank you, and thank you very much for various contributions.

--
Mike Schuh