Two or three weeks back I made a big leap. I switched from Windows XP Pro to Ubuntu as my primary desktop OS. World of Warcraft and the Cosmos addon updater were my big hold ups but since I managed to get both of them running under Wine I just couldn't resist.
Shortly after making the switch I decided to get a script written that would automatically check my Gmail account for CPAN Uploads and write them to disk as scripts (a batch file for Windows and a bash script for linux) that could be executed at a later time. I used an IMAP module that eludes me at the moment and the whole thing took ten minutes (including a few test runs). Previously I had one that ran on Windows but the Gmail module I was using fails ever since Gmail started rolling out the 2.0 changes so my CPAN Uploads folder had a few hundred uploads in it. I ran the script and it completed in a flash.
I dropped the Windows batch file in a Samba share and went to the bedroom to run the script on my laptop that's running Windows Vista. Everything was going smoothly so I left. A few hours later I go back to check on the progress and I find that the module installations had started failing at some point. I scrolled back and found the culprit. When I wrote the IMAP script I forgot to skip the Perl-Dist uploads and it dutifully tried to install Perl-Dist-VanillaPerl which hosed my configurations. D'oh!
Since it's Windows Vista system I don't want to go to the hassle of installing Strawberry Perl 5.8.8 since there is so much manual stuff to do to fix MinGW after the fact. So I can't wait for the next release of Strawberry Perl which I hope will fix the MinGW issues with Vista.
Re:Vista may still not work
Mr. Muskrat on 2007-12-19T00:25:54
I can hope can't I?
:D What I should have said was that I didn't want to deal with the hassle only to have to deal with the hassle again when the new version came out.
Based on your comment, is it safe for me to assume that the version of MinGW will not be changing in this release? Has anyone attempted to roll in the changes that need to be made? Aaron Giles has written up what needs to be done to get MinGW working under Vista.
As an aside, maybe I'm lucky but on my system I didn't need to have MinGW in a top level directory.
Re:Vista may still not work
Alias on 2007-12-19T01:33:36
There are a few minor changes being made to the c subsystem, but nothing substantial.
I do have some ideas for an experimental fix which would involve merging C:\distro\perl and C:\distro\c into just C:\distro (which would put MinGW into a top level directory and thus fulfil the workaround) but I don't want to do that in the default release.
First task is get Perl::Dist fully working, and then I'll start on the next round of changing the distribution itself.Re:Vista may still not work
Mr. Muskrat on 2007-12-19T06:42:15
Fair enough.
