The not-so-secret second Sekrit I've been working on for a little while has been the productisation of Perl 6, by reusing the Strawberry building system. The idea for Vanilla Perl 6 came about when someone at YAPC::NA mentioned that just about everyone working on Win32 parrot was doing so on top of Strawberry Perl.
I'd hoped that I could just build parrot and perl6 on top of the Strawberry build process, then rip the Perl 5 stuff out of the package once Perl 6 was built.
Unfortunately, despite trying several different methods, the Parrot/Perl6 currently available appears to be too immature to support packaging via Perl::Dist.
This isn't an issue with either the completeness of the implementation of Parrot, or the completeness of the implementation of Rakudo.
The problem in the current package is that all the utterly basic things needed to support packaging (like Configure.pl --prefix or make install or having an easy way to compile out all the debugging symbols) just don't work well enough for me to build a Perl::Dist-based distribution.
That's not to say it doesn't build though. It does build for me, and I can get all the way to a working perl6.exe binary. A number of Perl hackers had a fun time at OSDC::AU mucking around with Perl 6.
And I'm not saying a distribution couldn't be built at all. What I am saying is that there's already 5,000-10,000 lines of code in Perl::Dist that deals with all the weirdness of building C and Perl stuff on Windows, and it's still not enough to deal with the extra new weirdness in Parrot/Perl6.
Since this project was only ever viable for me as a low-work, high-yield project, I'm abandoning it for now, until the Parrot developers can come up with a build solution for people that aren't Parrot developers.
I'm told that it is a goal for 0.9, so I'll try building Vanilla again after that release.
If anyone would like to try to continue where I left off, the code is at
http://svn.ali.as/cpan/trunk/Perl-Dist-Parrot
If you try to run this, please ensure you have the svn versions of Perl-Dist and Perl-Dist-Strawberry installed.
