I'm putting together a presentation on Vanilla/Strawberry Perl for Perl Seminar NY
I'd love to include some real-world examples of how people are using it.
As of this morning, there have been 1500 downloads of various Vanilla/Strawbeery releases since my YAPC 2006 hackathon release in July. If you're one of those, please post a comment or send me an email with a couple lines about your experience.
Thanks!
Repost
jk2addict on 2006-10-02T13:51:21
Of course, you've seen mine already:
http://use.perl.org/comments.pl?sid=33110
Strawbs
Ron Savage on 2006-10-03T01:59:19
Yesterday I installed 48 modules, many via CPAN.pm and 18 manually (amid much confusion - see below). I may have missed some pre-requisites being installed, too, via CPAN.
There were various problems/scenarios:
o No 'install' for Compress::Zlib, ExtUtils::MakeMaker, Module::Signature
o 7 modules I wanted were up-to-date
o 3 (at least) got CRC errors under CPAN.pm so I downloaded and installed them manually (after repeated tries, including deleting the auto-download). PITA
o Several had mysterious tar errors (at work I have an unreliable wireless connexion, but I used that to manually download the successes - Curious), eg faulty headers, and sometimes I tried and succeeded to use WinZip to open to file CPAN.pm downloaded, so corruption of the download is not as obvious as you think
:-(
o Sometimes CPAN.pm fails, eg for PathTools, and spits out "try 'i
/PathTools/'" but I could not get that to select a distro. Probably my lack of understanding there on how to drive CPAN.pm.
I have many modules I use and will install one day, but next I think I'll install Oracle XE and try connecting via ODBC. I'm also thinking of downloading the source of Postgres, and compiling it so I can try compiling DBD::Pg, although I seems to recall one of Pg/MySQL only comes with a MS VC make file. Sigh.
Re XML 'v' GD etc. I'm with those who see XML and a
/small/ number of other such binary libs being sufficiently useful to include, but draw the line against GD etc. I'd very much like ImageMagick to work with Strawbs, but would not expect them to ship together. I'll ask on the ImageMagick mailing list about a dmake make file for the Windows version of ImageMagic.
All in all, great work so far. Congratulations. I look forward to the alien binary library problem being solved to some degree.
Re:Strawbs
Ron Savage on 2006-10-03T02:05:54
Also, wearing my absolute beginner's hat, I had trouble finding in Perl's docs how to upgrade an installed module. Beginners should not have to know Perl or CPAN(.pm) to do that, since they won't even know what to look for.
Please help users of Vanilla/Etc by making 'perl -MCPAN -e "install Killer::App"' prominent in the shipped docs.
