Firstly, aiui, I have to get a working rsync on this Win32 box. And it's the teeth-clenching, suicide-inducing frustration of that step that provides the major dis-incentive.

I have Cygwin, so I ran setup.exe to see if I could install rsync that way. Now, I'm sure rsync is available for Cygwin ... no idea whether it actually works ... but I'm sure it's there somewhere. Of course, it's over 6 months since I've done anything to update my Cygwin installation, and Setup.exe is so arcane in its behaviour that I can't get anywhere with it (tonight, anyway).

After half an hour of fucking around with the garbage that goes by the name of "Cygwin" I decided to give Google a try ... and located something called "rsync-win.zip" that supposedly wraps rsync.

So I downloaded it, installed it, and gave it a try:

C:\_32\rsync>rsync-wrap -avz rsync://public.activestate.com/perl-curre
+nt/
Bad destination "rsync://public.activestate.com/perl-current/" at C:\_
+32\rsync\r
sync-wrap.exe line 49.

This exe file was created with the evaluation version of Perl2Exe.
For more information visit http://www.indigostar.com
(The full version does not display this message with a 2 second delay.
+)
...

C:\_32\rsync>
[download]

I would love to be able to stay up to date with perl source developments, and I have the time at my disposal to do that. But I do not have the temperament to deal with the asociated frustrations (such as outlined above) - even if these frustrations arise from my own (as opposed to anyone else's) inadequacies.

Now ... if there were a tar.gz of the current perl source created once per week (say, at Friday 6pm Greenwich time), then that would be ideal for me. Admittedly, for the rest of the week, it's out of date (but it's never more than one week out of date). Thing is, I can get my computer to download a tar.gz from anywhere on the internet in an instant ... and no temptation to go looking for a loaded rifle.

Well ... I guess that aint gunna happen, so I'll just have to bite the bullet (ooow ... bad metaphor) and get rsync installed.

It just pisses me off that, in the time I've spent failing to get rsync installed, I could have downloaded and built both perl and Math::Pari at least twice.

I do have a (more or less) functional cvs utility. But that's not going to help me out, is it ?

Cheers,
Rob