At 9:41 am -0400 8/6/05, Janet Goldstein wrote:
Even those who have the knowledge to build Perl from source, as I have many times, welcome the convenience of binaries. Also, ppm is somewhat easier to use than CPAN.pm.
Amen to both. From Jaguar onwards I have probably done a dozen or so installations of Perl, and not for fun but to have access among other things to the Unicode developments that have taken place over this period. I would like to have been paid for the time and the frustration involved especially at the beginning -- in fact I would be fairly rich if I'd been paid for the time it took the installer itself without counting my own time. Getting CPAN to behave is also a black art.
During this time I have updated my Win32 machines with every update of the ActiveState distribution at the cost of clicking a few buttons. I am sure there are 36 different reasons for controlling special installations through the command line but for me, and I guess the majority of Perl users, they are irrelevant.
To "use the Perl that came with the OS", as Sherm recommends, is simply not satisfactory when important developments are happening within Perl. The Perls that shipped with Jaguar and with Panther were already aeons out of date when these were released.
Why does not Apple update Perl through sofware update? JD
