On Fri, 23 May 2008, Mark Dootson wrote: > I must confess, I've not quite got my head around what makes > Strawberry Perl more 'UNIX like' so at the moment ActivePerl + MinGW > (or a compiler of your choice) seems more or less equivalent to > Strawberry Perl to me.
StrawberryPerl already bundles MinGW whereas you have to install it separately in ActivePerl. Otherwise they work pretty much the same at the Perl level. Once you install MinGW you can use the CPAN shell with ActivePerl just fine. It even reconfigures itself automatically for use with either VC/nmake or GCC/dmake depending on whether it finds cl.exe on the PATH or not. ActivePerl contains additional things, like the PerlScript and PerlEx (ISAPI plugin), a PPM GUI client, nicely formatted HTML help and a bunch of modules already bundled with the distribution. A bigger difference between ActivePerl and StrawberryPerl is the licensing: You are not allowed to redistribute the ActivePerl installers outside your own organization (e.g. on a CD for sale, or as part of another product) without an OEM redistribution license. You are allowed to redistribute the parts of Perl and modules that you would need to create a standalone application with PAR (or PerlApp or Perl2Exe). StrawberryPerl redistribution does not require such an agreement as long as you comply with the requirement of the GPL for redistributing MinGW, which cannot be relicensed under the Perl Artistic license. Cheers, -Jan
