I haven't used MS Windows as my main OS in around 3 years - not long after I created Vanilla Perl for Alias' "vertical metre of beer" contest, in fact.
For various reasons, I decided this Monday to switch from using Fedora and running Windows inside a virtual machine when necessary - to running Windows 7 as my main OS, and running Fedora inside a virtual machine when necessary.
After installation, I grabbed the latest Strawberry Perl installer and ran it - nice and quick, with no unnecessary questions.
Fired up a console - yup, perl.exe is in my path - nice.
Then I fired up the CPAN shortcut from the programs menu - `install HTML::FormFu` - completed with no errors - nice.
Same for Catalyst, DBIx::Class, HTML::FormFu::Model::DBIC, ...
Catalyst::Controller::HTML::FormFu failed with errors from WWW::Mechanize - but then that normally happens for me under linux too. If memory serves, I force installed WWW::Mechanize, installed Test::WWW::Mechanize, force installed Catalyst::Test::WWW::Mechanize, and then installed Catalyst::Controller::HTML::FormFu with all tests passing.
Tried installing DBD::mysql and after spending far too long battling with its Makefile.PL and then compilation errors, I thought "does Strawberry ship with a working PPM nowadays?" - and yes - it does!
Start a new console; ppm; install DBD::mysql.
very nice!
Yes, then I installed Padre with no errors :)
which isn't something I had managed to do under Fedora - after building a threading perl, I still couldn't get Wx to install.
I'm not complaining about the installation errors I did encounter - I consider having to work around occasional cpan errors as a small price to pay for the benefits that cpan modules give me - heck, my own modules aren't immune from installation errors occasionally.
What amazes me is - first, how far the Strawberry Perl community have taken the original Vanilla Perl hack and made it into an unrecognisably slick and usable product - and secondly, how their testing and feedback efforts have made Perl on Windows so much more viable and enjoyable.
Looking at strawberryperl.com and the win32.perl.org wiki, I can't even figure out who is currently working on the project - so thanks, whoever you are! ;)
and say "thank you". It's basically a cooperation between 3 people now.
I'm the "coder" of the team that tries to make it all fit together on the perl end, Alias is the release manager, and kmx (he's not on use.perl, I don't think) helps us by building the c libraries and gcc toolchain binaries in order to be able to build Perl.
Well, it seems to me that you made some lucky guesses. I didn't. I wish these were tips on a welcome page, either a HTML page that the installer opens at the end, or on an introduction page on Strawberry Perl's website, with the link shown at the end of the installation.
Something like this:
Welcome to Strawberry Perl
Strawberry Perl put itself in your PATH. So go ahead, open a cmd console window, and type "perl -V".
Strawberry Perl comes with a preconfigured CPAN.pm, a make tool, and a C compiler. Everything you need to install modules. Click on the "CPAN Client" link in the start menu, and you can start installing modules from the CPAN shell.
But that may take quite some time! Strawberry Perl now can also install precompiled modules via PPM. Open a console window, type "PPM" and you're in our console based PPM shell, ready to go.
