All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Vanilla Perl Build 15 - Loads of new toys

brian_d_foy on 2008-03-08T19:56:00

http://ali.as/download/vanilla-perl-5.10.0-build-15.exe (14.4 MB)

I'm happy to (FINALLY) release the new Vanilla Perl build 15.

Vanilla Perl is the experimental Win32 Perl distribution with the mandate to do the absolute minimum amount of changes to the Perl core to get various features working.

This latest experimental release contains most of the new tricks that will be in the upcoming April Strawberry Perl, and probably the biggest number of new features yet in a Vanilla release.

XML::Parser

This release comes with Expat and XML::Parser built in (since I still can't make XML::Parser install from CPAN itself and you can't upgrade it).

So it should be possible to build a range of other stuff on top of it now (like PPM support, which is out of the scope of Vanilla).

Win32::API

Although it probably won't stay in Vanilla beyond this release, I've bundled in Win32::API out of the box. With Win32::API also comes (be necessity) with libwin32 bundled in as well (which is by far the biggest install from cpan.strawberryperl.com).

With those two installed, most of the rest of the Win32:: family should install relatively easily.

Relocation

This release contains experimental patches for all three configuration files that contain hard-coded paths to make them capable or handling the Perl installation being shoved around.

This should also be the first release usable for people interested in creating Portable Perl type distributions for flash drives, etc. Of course, this is still an .exe installer (which Portable Perl people don't want, cause it dumps crap into the registry).

This particular feature WON'T be in Strawberry Perl, but it involved adding some extra capabilities in regards to tweaking installs.

libwwwperl aka LWP

Because I refuse to use FTP CPAN mirrors any more (HTTP being infinitely superior in every way) Vanilla now comes with LWP out of the box.

This also means that the built in CPAN mirrors can be used now, intead of it falling back on the horrible FTP defaults.

Righto then...

So, with Vanilla 15 working, time to move on to getting a Strawberry Beta.

Building on Vista

persicom on 2008-03-09T02:45:11

Does any of this cover/fix the problem of building modules that require C compiling under Vista? There are a few "solutions" floating around the net. OTTOMH, I think they basically say that you have to add the compiler to your PATH, but it would be better, obviously, if we had a fix.

Thanks.

Re:Building on Vista

Alias on 2008-03-10T04:52:50

No, April Strawberry won't fix the Vista problem, because the people responsible for supplying the relevant bits haven't done a production release of the fixes yet.

There's various dodgy patches floating around, and there's been a release that broke Perl 5.10.0, but nothing stable enough to push into Strawberry this cycle.

It could easily make it by July Strawberry though.

My hope for your distribution.

aero on 2008-03-09T03:32:28

1. Vanilla/Strawberry perl installer add INCLUDE,LIB,PATH and TERM environment variable when installing. but don't remove those when uninstalling. I think it must be cleaned.

2. Installer in .msi format such as win32 apache or win32 python distribution.

Re:My hope for your distribution.

Alias on 2008-03-10T04:59:12

1. I think it must be cleaned as well. I've made a bit of a start on it, and once I get the beta out, I'll make a go at getting a solution sorted in time.

2. Not gunna happen in this cycle, probably won't happen in the next cycle either.

Changing to .msi is a MASSIVE job, and highly complicated.

Some initial work has been done on it, but it's going to take a while.