I'm pleased to announce the arrival of Vanilla Perl Build 4.
At YAPC::NA, Alias challenged me to have a new release of Vanilla Perl and an alpha release of Strawberry Perl out on Thursday during the hackathon. Of course, when he said Thursday, he didn't realize that would be Thursday of this week. The installer can be downloaded from vanillaperl.com.
This work builds on the excellent results of the original vertical metre of beer challenge and subsequent bug-squashing as chronicled at win32.perl.org.
The biggest change during the hackathon was automating the process of building a Vanilla Perl. This is now available on CPAN as Perl::Dist::Vanilla. While more refactoring is necessary, this is the first step towards creating a general tool for the creation of custom executable installers for Win32. For more changes in Build 4, see the Changes file.
Here's more about the project from vanillaperl.com:
Vanilla Perl Project
The Vanilla Perl Project is a experiment to provide binary Perl distributions for the Microsoft Windows platform that include a bundled compiler. Bundling a compiler provides the ability to install XS CPAN modules directly from CPAN, making the Win32 Perl development more akin to Unix perl development.
Vanilla Perl Series
The Vanilla Perl series provides a Perl 5.8.8 distribution that is as close to to the Perl core as possible, with a small set of upgraded versions of dual CPAN/core modules that have win32-specific fixes.
Vanilla Perl is experimental and is not intended for production purposes. It is targeted to master-level Win32 Perl developers and those who wish to experiment with building their own custom Win32 Perl distributions. Vanilla Perl releases are numbered only as sequential 'builds' and will not follow any alpha/beta/release plan.
I'm continuing work on Strawberry Perl and have high hopes to have a release later this week. Allison and the TPF are also conducting a license review to confirm that it can indeed be released under the same terms as Perl. Stay tuned for more win32 Perl...
