I've had a number of people asking when the new Perl::Dist and Perl::Dist::Strawberry will be out, so people can start rolling their own distributions.
I just wanted to quickly explain the delay.
Because of the urgency of the release of Strawberry Perl, it was built on a SVN just-barely there implementation that has a number of ugly hard-codings and hard-to-use elements, and an API that roughly hewn and not particularly clean.
I had to manually tweak a lot of things that should conceptually run automatically by default as well.
As a result, I've been spending a little time cleaning up the standard of the code itself, adding more sensible defaults and automatically deriving more information so that the Perl::Dist module won't be going out of date every few days.
(Every time a dual-life toolchain module gets update, Perl::Dist goes out of sync and needs updating).
It's also currently not possible to flexibly build one "product" on both Perl 5.8.8 and Perl 5.10.0, something which is clearly needed given 5.10.0 is a dot-zero release and has it's set of bugs.
I've also been trying to write some (any) documentation, so users aren't stranded in the dark.
The biggest lesson I learned from PPI is that just because your code does something insane, there's still no excuse for not having a usable API and good documentation. The API and doc polishing is definitely worth it.
So I want that resolved before too many people start playing with it.
This clean up work is progressing satisfactorily, and I should be done in a week or so.
If you are really keen (there's a few of you) and want to start working on Strawberry-derived distributions before I complete the clean up, you are welcome to use the SVN versions from my repository.
I intend to keep them in a reasonably workable state, although they call it the bleading edge for a reason :)
Anyone that wants to contribute as well is more than welcome to a commit bit.
