To mark my Strawberry Perl talk at OSCON (which although somewhat lightly attended was well received) I had desperately tried to have both the new Vista-compatible July 2008 Strawberry beta, AND the second alpha release of Perl on a Stick ready for my talk.
Despite burning both the midnight oil AND a dozen or so CPU hours, I missed it due to an untimely flash-drive-transmitted computer virus I think I caught from an Internet Cafe in Sydney while doing some field testing of Perl-on-a-Stick and the PortableApps.com platform.
This was a bit sad, since with the mighty help of Jim Brandt and the TPF we had procured a 50-run limited edition flash drive, labelled with the Perl onion logo (i.e. The Perl logo on a memory stick). I had hoped to be able to distribute them (for a small donation to the TPF of course) during the talk.
No matter though, because I did manage to get the final packaging issues for this new release (which combines BOTH the July 2008 Vista-compatible Strawberry Perl AND the Perl-on-a-Stick alpha 2 code) resolved by early evening, and produced the first master zip file.
The result? The special new Super Schwag "Perl on a Perl on a Stick Stick" flash drive, featuring Perl both on the outside AND on the inside of the memory stick.
I believe there are around 40 left at this point, although based on initial demand just from the late evening, it looks like they are going to disappear very quickly tomorrow.
If you happen to be in Portland, or know someone that is, you can find them available for a donation of $15 from the Perl Foundation stand in the Expo Room at OSCON 2008. Hallway and expo-only passes are available to grt if needed I believe.
Based on the reaction so far, if we run out I will try to arrange a second batch to take to YAPC::EU.
I've also had more than one person ask me if Perl-on-a-Stick distribution could be produced targeting Mac OS X rather than Windows.
In principle I don't see why this couldn't be done, although worry adding this capability to Perl::Dist would be quite difficult and possible MORE than double the code size.
But then the Portable is mostly cross platform already, and the main problem would be working out exactly HOW you would structure a complete Perl installation (including C libraries and what not) inside a directory at an arbitrary location.
I'm not sure a standalone installer for Mac OS X has been done before (could be wrong here though). But it does remain an excellent idea though, given the Mac density amongst the Perl glitterati.
Apart from pushing forwards to production releases, the only other plans I have for Perl::Dist in the short term is to try and split out the C-specific code form the Perl-specific code, with a view to creating an alternate build subclass capable of creating some sort of "Vanilla Perl 6" Win32 distribution.
