As I've mentioned, I did Strawberry 5.10.0 in a bit of a rush, focusing on the quality and stability of the actual Perl distro, and culling distro features that weren't straight forward, and fighting a losing battle to keep the API sane during the break-neck pace of the coding.
So while I keep MEANING to get the documentation finished and get a stable version of Perl::Dist released, every time I look at the code I get a serious case of Shiny Feature Syndrome and keep deciding to just rip up some part of the API and do it better.
So if anyone has any sub-classes, sorry but I've probably just broke them all again. But then that's what the giant warning sign at the top of the docs said I might do :)
With some somewhat ugly (OO-wise) refactoring of the app_* methods, adding a series of perl_version_* methods, and heavily upgrading the Perl::Dist::Util::Toolchain module (which auto-resolves the CPAN toolchain distribution bootstrap installation sequence), Perl::Dist now has the ability to use a single distribution class to build the distribution for multiple Perl versions.
So basically, now I can do the following.
> perldist --perl_version=5100 Vanilla
(an hour of CPU grinding)
> perldist --perl_version=588 Vanilla
(another hour of CPU grinding)
And get a matched pair of distribution installers for BOTH Perl 5.8.8 and Perl 5.10.0 for the same distribution class.
And I also should be able to extend this to ANY arbitrary new version of Perl, possibly including bleadperl.
I'll be releasing a new Build 14 of Vanilla as soon as the CPU grinding is done, which will come in the aforementioned matched pair of installers.
Vanilla Build 14 also comes with a new experimental default CPAN/Config.pm, which should make CPAN::Config install-path independent. Or at least, it will to the extend that it will extract the paths from Config.pm... which is still hard-coded.
But modifying CPAN::Config is a lot less extreme than modifying Config itself, so it's a start.
Update: Now downloadable at http://ali.as/download/.
