On the main Strawberry Perl website, it says in giant font right on the front page "No additional installation required.". Since there's only 4 paragraphs on the entire website, that's 25% of the website documentation reserved to explicitly say that there's no additional installation required.
Is this perhaps not being clear enough that you don't have to do any other installation?
Andy Lester on Perl Buzz has unfortunately linked to a utterly incorrect blog post purporting to describe how to install and set up Strawberry Perl. So for the sake of correcting people, here is the "official" installation procedure needed to install Strawberry and get a working and configured CPAN client.
1. Uninstall any other versions of Perl, including Active Perl and cygwin. (There are some hacks posted by people to avoid this, but for now Strawberry only supports being the only Perl on the machine).
2. Download the Strawberry Perl installer.
3. Run the Strawberry Perl installer.
4a. Run Start -> Programs -> Strawberry Perl -> CPAN Client.
4b. Alternatively if you prefer the console, run "cpan".
That is the ENTIRE install/setup procedure for Strawberry Perl. There's no need for binary programs, it's automatically installed for you. There's no need for configuring CPAN, it's automatically pre-configured for you. There's no need to pick a CPAN mirror, it's automatically selected for you. Sure, you CAN install extra binary tools if you want, and run the CPAN configuration manually if you want, but NONE of it is necessary.
25% of the Strawberry website is devoted to saying so. Both posts do Strawberry Perl a disservice, and should be corrected.
It's happily coexisting with cygwin on a Windows VM here - unless there's some subtle problem I've missed.
What kind of problems would you expect?
Re:Happy w/ cygwin here
Alias on 2008-01-07T23:41:49
The main problems with co-existance are due to things like PATH entries resolving to one or the other.
Also, someone reported problems where Strawberry sets TERM to 'dumb' and this changes a behaviour in cygwin.Re:Happy w/ cygwin here
AndyArmstrong on 2008-01-07T23:47:43
Ah - I have Strawberry before cygwin in the path and haven't used cygwin much since installing Strawb so I've maybe missed some borkage there.Re:Happy w/ cygwin here
dagolden on 2008-01-08T00:42:17
A few references on the (minor) issues with multiple Perls installed:
- Parrallel [sic] installation of ActivePerl 5.8, Strawberry and ActivePerl 5.10
- RT#31999 Under cygwin, cygwin's 'cpan' is used instead of Strawberry's 'cpan.bat'
-- dagolden
Re:Happy w/ cygwin here
Alias on 2008-01-08T06:25:00
BTW, some of the problems mentioned can be fixed with relatively subtle (but involving a fair amount of coding) changes to the way we do installation and such... we'll look into them for future releases.
Next -> Next -> Finished
Done.
Yes, it's that easy.
I saw an article that I thought would be helpful to get the word out on Strawberry Perl, and I posted to it. I would think that the attitude come from you would have been "Thanks for the link, but there's a problem" rather than calling my article a "disservice."
Re:Cut me some slack
Alias on 2008-01-08T01:47:48
I do indeed appreciate the attempt to get the word out, but it pains me that it was via that link.
"Now, I thought that part of Strawberry Perl was that you wouldn't need any external tools, but maybe they're just for building CPAN modules."
Your comments seem to show that you were uncertain about the article anyways
His post is so clearly wrong that it would have been the work of a few moments to verify the article with any of the residents of #win32, or any of the Strawberry people in #perl or #p5p or #toolchain.
Or even a quick email to David or myself.
Re:Cut me some slack
brian_d_foy on 2008-01-08T02:59:42
Cut you some slack from running a article you couldn't verify? Is PerlBuzz the new Fox News? How hard is it to do a bit of fact checking? You had "no way" of verifying it? Maybe you don't like Windows, but I'm sure you could use a Windows box somewhere. Or ask someone, or several other ways. Heck, I'm not a Windows guy, but I installed it as a VMWare guest OS so I could verify things in Windows.
If you want to be in the news business, you're held to a higher standard than the random blog post by an individual. You've already noted how you messed up in your 5.10 press release, and you're seeing it again now. If you want to report the news, you first have to understand it. If you don't understand it, you ask more questions and find people who do.
If you really want to report the news, you have to say "I'll do better" rather than "cut me some slack". It's not how you mess up, but how you handle it. You, however, like to blame other people when you blow it. That attitude doesn't get a lot of slack, and you don't seem interested in figuring out how to prevent the problem.
Sure, it sucks and life is hard, but that's how it is when you're a publisher and author.
Re:Cut me some slack
petdance on 2008-01-08T03:11:46
I think that we all understand that you think I suck, brian.Re:Cut me some slack
Aristotle on 2008-01-08T04:29:07
Personally, I don’t think you suck. I think your heart is in the right place. However, you blunder quite a bit. I have to agree with brian that “cut me some slack” is not enough. Ben Tilly’s thoughts on forgiveness are worth keeping in mind in this context. In short, neither blame nor forgiveness are very useful; they’re ultimately unproductive. What matters is to ask “can this be fixed? how?” and “what can I learn from this for the future?”.
Re:Cut me some slack
petdance on 2008-01-08T05:10:24
I have to agree with brian that “cut me some slack” is not enough.
Not enough for what?
Don't answer, it's rhetorical.
Re:Did this really need to be on the front page?
brian_d_foy on 2008-01-08T07:30:46
That's my fault. I've taken it off the front page.Re:Did this really need to be on the front page?
sigzero on 2008-01-08T12:50:12
At least you didn't say "Cut me some slack!".:-)
