All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

A verticle meter of beer.

meanroy on 2006-09-04T12:21:06

I've been using/learning Perl for a while now.

Downloading desired modules has been a continuing problem from day one! I've managed to get most of what I need if it's a native Perl module, but never succeded in getting a make to work.
Most lately, I needed a module, GD.pm, it requires some other stuff, which must be compiled. (This is because of ActiveStates poor support of ppm module conversion.)
As noted on use.perl.org a reward (a vertical meter of beer)was offered for a windoz installation of Perl which filled several requirement. Among them being:

4. The installer MUST also install a (legal) compiler (preferably gcc), preconfigured to work normally when installing XS modules from CPAN.

The award was duly issued to stennie, and worked at the time. Wow! Cool!
But Wait!
Oh shit, when I downloaded and tried it, guess what. Thats right, it's broken. Now this is not an insurmountable obstacle, the directions are there and so are the links to the tools. So in theory, you can reverse engineer and duplicate, eventually getting it to work.
I'm now in the process of trying to do so, but what a PITA! It turned out the 'main' problem was the download site for the GCC tool chain was hard coded in the installer file. So I submit the "solution" isn't really, it's just a road-map so you can roll your own. (even though it's on sourceforge, no-ones maintaining it.)
Again, what a PITA!
Been working at this for WAY too long and God knows how much longer it'll take!
MeanRoy.

Re: A verticle meter of beer.

fireartist on 2006-09-04T14:25:15

Although CamelPack won the contest, the other entry, VanillaPerl is the solution that is being developed.
Check out http://win32.perl.org/ and you'll see that there was another release last week.

Wrong project

Aristotle on 2006-09-04T15:09:32

Forget CamelPack, that was more or less a quick hack to prove the concept and get the reward. The eventually emerged favoured project is Vanilla Perl. I am led to believe that what you want will work out of the box with that. For more Perl on Windows, see win32.perl.org.

Re:Wrong project

Aristotle on 2006-09-04T15:55:25

And to be precise, you want Strawberry Perl distribution.

Re:Wrong project

Alias on 2006-09-04T22:36:27

And to be even more precise, go install this!

http://vanillaperl.com/files/strawberry-perl-5.8.8-alpha-2.exe :)

Re:Wrong project

dagolden on 2006-09-05T12:30:25

However, GD still requires the GD library to be installed -- Perl can't do this for you (yet). We're working on the external library dependency problem, but it's a long road. (See Vanilla Perl and GnuWin32 for some examples.)

But if you install a binary of the GD library for Win32, GD.pm's Makefile.PL is polite enough to ask you where to find it. Hopefully, that will be enough. (But if not, please chronicle your frustrations at Vanilla Perl Problem Modules.)