I just looked at the activestate website to see the status of activestate Perl. The Changelog entries told me that either Perl is getting more stable, demanding fewer releases, or that ActiveState Perl begins to lag behind ...
This is the release frequence of ActiveState Perl:
2000: 13
2001: 5
2002: 3
2003: 2
With only a total of 3 5.8.x releases ...
I really hope Sophos keeps the ActiveState Perl product alive!
Johan
Re:My money...
Louis_Wu on 2003-11-07T20:01:11
If I'm interpreting you correctly, that means that Perl versions released by the PumpKing are becoming more Windows-friendly. I like that.Only 3 releases of 5.8.x - all are version 5.8.0, plus "Several bug fixes and other improvements have been merged from the Perl development track", plus changes to their 'whizzy tools'. I was expecting to see 5.8.1 in there. Maybe they're waiting for 5.8.2.
Re:My money...
jand on 2003-11-08T03:50:25
ActivePerl 5.8.1 build 807 was supposed to be released by October 14th. I've stopped the release several times because of binary incompatibilities between 5.8.0 and 5.8.1. We definitely don't want to maintain separate PPM repositories for 5.8.0 and 5.8.1.Build 807 has now been approved by our QA and should go out some time next week. It will still be based on 5.8.1, but has about 70% of the patches on the way to 5.8.2. The major missing piece is the new rehashing scheme.
Re:My money...
jand on 2003-11-08T04:02:16
ActivePerl has been extremely close to core perl for a long time. At least since 5.6 days. The difference are just additional bug fixes integrated from the core development track. We do submit all patches we want to make to ActivePerl to p5p first and then integrate the patches back from the core repository (at least in principle). There are some remaining differences, but I hope to get most of them removed over the next few months.I always view ActivePerl releases as being snapshots somewhere along the path between core maintenance releases.
Although the core Perl distribution hasn't required many releases recently, some of the bundled CPAN modules could really do with an update.
Given that the majority of windows boxes don't have a compiler installed, bundling CPAN modules is a significant part of ActiveState's 'value add'. That value diminishes however the longer they continue to ship old versions.
Re:Bundled Modules Looking Dated
jand on 2003-11-08T03:54:17
FYI, the following modules are being updated to their latest version in ActivePerl 807:Archive-Tar-1.07
Compress-Zlib-1.22
Data-Dump-1.01
Digest-MD2-2.03
Digest-MD5-2.30
Digest-SHA1-2.06
File-CounterFile-1.01
HTML-Parser-3.34
HTML-Tree-3.18
URI-1.27
XML-Parser-2.34
XML-Simple-2.09
libwin32-0.21
libwww-perl-5.75Re:Bundled Modules Looking Dated
grantm on 2003-11-08T20:51:24
Fantastic. Thanks for the info.
