Plan9/9front i386 build

[unobe]

Perl building on Plan 9 has not been updated for two decades. In each release of Perl since then, the versions have been updated when in fact they should have been pulled from a variable. This pull request updates Plan 9 to build on 9front, a fork of Plan 9. The last binary distribution of Perl 5 for Plan 9 was done by Bell Labs more than a decade ago, with no instructions on updating the plan9/ directory. The plan9/ files before this pull request will not build on stock Plan 9 or on 9front, and the work done here will at least get a successful compilation of perl with some basic tests working. More work needs to be done but this is the first step and allows for easier upstreaming of changes by other Plan 9 developers to allow Perl to successfully build on different architectures, not just i386.

Some of the changes in this pull request are not ideal, but are practical given the brokenness of Perl 5 builds on Plan 9. For instance, you'll note that there is a patch file that are stored within this request: 9front.patch. Yet the alternative is worse: a bit-rotten plan9/ directory which will continue to be useful at all for anyone working on Plan 9. The plan is that by the time Perl 7 is released these shortcomings will be resolved.

[unobe]

Okay, looks like Travis-CI is complaining because I didn't add myself as an author, I didn't update the number of files for the manifest, and didn't set fndvers to have an exec bit. Same issue appears with the Sanity Linux -Dusethreads check. Other than those three trivial test fixes, anything else?

[oridb]

Tested and confirmed that this builds and runs on 32-bit 9front, though there are still some 64-bit issues that I've not yet resolved.

[Leont]

Would you be able to set a smoker up? We can help with this if you can make such a system available.

Without a smoker it is likely to get broken again in the future, and hence we don't generally put a lot of effort into architectures without smokers.

[unobe]

Would you be able to set a smoker up? We can help with this if you can make such a system available.

Without a smoker it is likely to get broken again in the future, and hence we don't generally put a lot of effort into architectures without smokers.

Yes, I'd be able to, but most likely not immediately. Maybe by next week. Considering how long it's been broken, I don't see that Plan9 had any effort put into it for almost two decades. I'll let you know when I have it setup.

[oridb]

No idea what kind of smoker infrastructure would be needed, but if the infrastructure supports it, we can hook something to sourcehut's test runners. (https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-05-11-sourcehut-plus-plan-9/)

[unobe]

No idea what kind of smoker infrastructure would be needed, but if the infrastructure supports it, we can hook something to sourcehut's test runners. (https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-05-11-sourcehut-plus-plan-9/)

Yep, that was my plan, @oridb ! I have an account on sourcehut, just haven't had time to set anything up.

[khwilliamson]

@unobe please rebase so we can merge

[unobe]

@khwilliamson , I've resolved the conflicts.

[atoomic]

@unobe still some conflicts to resolve: This branch cannot be rebased due to conflicts

[atoomic]

@unobe I realized that this branch is hard to review, even in GitHub.
Could you please provide a clean rebase on top of blead?

Right now the branch looks like this, ideally we should not view the Merge commits in your pull request, but just a set of individual commits.

*   3a357b343a  Merge branch 'blead' of https://github.com/unobe/perl5 into blead (8 minutes ago, Romano)  (HEAD -> unobe_blead, unobe/blead)
|\
| * ba6b3af4e6  Merge branch 'blead' into blead (12 hours ago, David Romano)
* | fd46be57c8  Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/blead' into blead (33 hours ago, Romano)  (unobe/17891)
|/
* 92c4078967  shorten 9front.patch by updating sv.c, and fix MANIFEST file ordering (5 weeks ago, Romano)
* de39a1ce4e  fix for tests (5 weeks ago, Romano)
* 56aa9fbdad  fix bad version (5 weeks ago, Romano)
* 6b625d21b3  add 9front.patch (6 weeks ago, Romano)
* ba9242ab52  Plan9/9front i386 fixes (6 weeks ago, Romano)

Note: I also noticed that you are using a branch named blead using blead for a topic branch is probably a bad idea and I would suggest to use a custom branch for this Pull Request.

thanks

[unobe]

@atoomic , @khwilliamson : see branch 17891-rebase-20200803 : https://github.com/unobe/perl5/tree/17891-rebase-20200803 . I don't see an easy way to modify the branch for this pull request. I could open up another pull request and reference this one, if you prefer.

[atoomic]

@unobe the branch 17891-rebase-20200803 looks much cleaner.

You are right, if you rename the branch this would be a new Pull Request. As there is a lot of history and exchange in this ticket. It would be painful to switch between two cases.

What I would suggest is do a hard reset of your blead branch that you used for your pull request to 17891-rebase-20200803 branch. Do not touch that blead branch, until this case is merged, then you can go back to track blead?

As the other alternate I think would be to open a new PR, let's avoid that for now.

[unobe]

@atoomic : I just ran 'git push --force origin' for blead.

[karenetheridge]

@atoomic , could you please add a perldelta entry?

[atoomic]

@karenetheridge perl delta entry via 6206614