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Re: Getting Fed Up with ActiveState

by perrin (Chancellor)
on Dec 01, 2006 at 19:58 UTC ( [id://587281]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Getting Fed Up with ActiveState

I understand it can be frustrating, but try to remember who you're talking about here. ActiveState's Perl team is not some faceless evil entity; it's a bunch of perl hackers just like you, who you probably had lunch with at a conference at some point. The fact that these well-meaning people have not been able to make every CPAN module available perfectly on PPM should tell you something: it's damn hard to build every CPAN module, much less build them all on Windows.

There is much less standardization in CPAN dists than many of us assume. The prereqs are often wrong or incomplete, there are lots of custom build scripts that need to be modified for Windows, many test suites either only work for the author or expect interactive input, and the sheer volume of the task is just enormous.

I personally have always had good experiences with PPM, which is doubly surprising since I expected installing anything on Win32 to be a nightmare. I installed full DBD::Oracle support on a Windows machine effortlessly thanks to them.

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Re^2: Getting Fed Up with ActiveState
by xdg (Monsignor) on Dec 04, 2006 at 06:18 UTC
    The fact that these well-meaning people have not been able to make every CPAN module available perfectly on PPM should tell you something

    It's not that they can't -- it's that they choose not to. Backwards compatibility (to the earliest 58x release) has been chosen over supporting the latest developments in Perl. That's OK -- it makes perfect sense for a company providing "enterprise" Perl support. But it's a limiting choice for others.

    -xdg

    Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

      Can you explain a bit more? What is it that you think they chose not to do in this case?

        They've decided not to build PPM's for the 58x series unless those PPM's can be run on their earliest 58x release (and without upgrading core modules).

        Recent AS releases of 58x have a version of Scalar::Util in core that has refaddr. So any module requiring it will run fine on a recent release from AS. But because refaddr isn't available in the Scalar::Util in the earliest 58x core, any modules that depend on it won't be automatically built into PPMs by AS.

        Fortunately, Randy Kobes has been building more recent PPM's at the uwinnipeg repository. Unfortunately, that's a manual process.

        -xdg

        Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

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