On Monday my Perl install at work on my rather feeble Wintel box died. Something horrible happened, PPM3 decided to delete modules rather than install them, and all manner of bad things happened.
I decided it was time to test Perl 5.8.0, there is a nice binary available from Activestate, so I gave it a try. PPM3 seemed more keen to install things properly this time round, and it went rather well.
Yesterday I had to upgrade to Apache 2, as Apache1.3.x/mod_Perl doesn't play well with Perl 5.8. I spent most of yesterday getting Apache2 on the box, and making mod_Perl work.
Other than the fact I did all this without reading the instructions, and only when things didn't work did I bother to check what I was supposed to be doing, it's gone rather well.
I don't want to point the finger of blame at ActiveState and PPM, but I do think that CPAN is a lot easier to use, and so far it's been more reliable in my experience. Obviously if I had a Windows c/c++ compiler then I could just build from source like I do on my Linux boxes.
There are days that I toy with using Cygwin for Perl/Apache, but the ActiveState build has a few advantages that I've not been able to let go of yet. If I could run Linux as a desktop client then I wouldn't have any problems, but alas that's not possible...
