HP gave a sign of cutting loose from the project of keeping the perl scripting language up to date for the 3000. The vendor engineered the port of perl and had implemented updates through the 5.8 version, even though customers had to use the language without HP support for the MPE/iX implementation. HP's Mark Bixby, the engineer who's moved Apache and sendmail to the 3000, announced that he's out of time to take perl to the 5.8.7 level. Customers are being offered the chance to pick up HP's slack.

"I’ve been approached by the keepers of Perl to test a pre-release copy of 5.8.7 on MPE, but I have absolutely zero free time for doing so,"Bixby said in a May posting to the 3000 newsgroup. "If one of you Perl fans is interested in doing this and keeping Perl current on MPE, please contact me off-list, and I will tell you where to download the 5.8.7 source code from."

Bixby can be reached at mark.bixby@hp.com.

The process involves using gcc to compile Perl from source, running the Perl test suite, then investigating and fixing any MPE-related bugs that crop up, then submitting source code changes back to the official Perl source repository.