[Rd] Solution to (well known) problem with Rdconv.pm on Sun Solaris (PR#1093)

[Kurt Hornik]

>>>>> Prof Brian Ripley writes:

> On Sat, 15 Sep 2001 hb@maths.lth.se wrote:
>> Full_Name: Henrik Bengtsson
>> Version: 1.3.1
>> OS: Sun Solaris 8
>> Submission from: (NULL) (130.235.3.49)
>> 
>> 
>> I have been trying to install [R] v1.3.1 locally on a Sun Solaris 8 machine and
>> I ran into the (already known) perl problems that express theselves as:

> [...]

>> My suggestion is to add this to Rdconv.pm at the 5 lines above. This would make
>> the building of [R] a little bit easier.
>> 
>> 
>> Perl version used:
>> 
>> "This is perl, version 5.003 with EMBED built under solaris at Sep 14 1996
>                                                                         ^^^^
>> 22:39:00 + suidperl security patch".

> It was a bug in one version of perl around five years ago.  Incidentally,
> it must have been built under a much older version of Solaris (as I recall
> 2.6 came out in 1998: certainly we first used it in late 1998), and
> we find it is a good idea to rebuild perl at Solaris upgrades, especially
> upgrading from 2.5.x.

> We don't know (and don't have the resources to check) if the changed
> version works on all more recent perl versions in use by R installers.

> I do believe the solution is well-known: use perl 5.005, 5.6.0 or
> (preferably) 5.6.1.  Perhaps we should test for perl >= 5.005?

Not sure, from a theoretical point of view: we really only require Perl
version 5.  But if we think that anything less than 5.005 is too buggy
then let's go for the change.  (Something like

	${PERL} -e 'require 5.005 or exit 1'

in PERL5_CHECK() of m4/R.m4?)

-k
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