David Golden recently alerted me to his Strawberry Perl distribution for Win32. It bundles GCC, dmake and a slew of useful modules and for my money provides a better out of the box experience than ActiveState. The default for installing modules is cpan rather than ppd and the bundled GCC means that XS modules build just fine. It also bundles David's excellent CPAN::Reporter which means you'll be giving module authors helpful Win32 feedback every time you install.
It's currently alpha but I found it completely stable. It manages to work pretty much like Perl on other platforms without having to pretend that Windows is another platform (à la Cygwin).
Just a nit -- CPAN::Reporter isn't bundled with Strawberry, but it does install cleanly, which is very nice for harassing -- (ahem!) I mean informing -- authors when their modules do not test cleanly on Windows.
Otherwise, thank you very much for your kind words about Strawberry.
-- dagolden
Re:CPAN::Reporter isn't bundled
AndyArmstrong on 2007-10-14T13:38:00
Ah - thanks for the correction David. I think you should bundle CPAN::Reporter though:) Re:CPAN::Reporter isn't bundled
dagolden on 2007-10-14T13:59:38
That's a good suggestion. Alias declared himself the pumpking for the next release, so hopefully he'll read this and comment.
Re:CPAN::Reporter isn't bundled
Alias on 2007-10-14T23:49:20
Indeed I shall be bundling more development-style modules into the next release, and CPAN::Reporter would probably be a good addition.
The only downside is that it does not auto-configure (yet) so as I understand it, I'd need to make people configure it?Re:CPAN::Reporter isn't bundled
dagolden on 2007-10-15T01:11:31
A config file could be written to
.cpanreporter/config.ini in the "My Documents" folder -- the sticky part will be the email address of the sender. It might be possible to make some changes so there is some better prompting -- i.e. if no config file is found to ask about starting to configure instead of just warning about it.
Re:CPAN::Reporter isn't bundled
AndyArmstrong on 2007-10-15T08:15:38
Can't you just loop through the Outlook address book and pick one at random? It's a very popular technique with virus writers:) Re:CPAN::Reporter isn't bundled
Alias on 2007-10-16T06:06:24
That or I suppose we could go with a specific email address intended to mean "unknown".
