On Jun 29, 2008, at 8:23 AM, Paul Miller wrote:
Why is everyone so down on Active Perl lately?
I was just at YAPC::NA two weeks ago, and Adam Kennedy was talking
about the status of Strawberry Perl and how it differs from
ActiveState. He went into great detail about the differences between
the two--details I can't recall all of so I can't go into here--but
(for me) it boils down to one major thing: CPAN support.
There are certain modules in the PPM repository that ActiveState
cannot, for contractual support reasons, update because they would
break installations they have support contract with. There are other
modules that don't build cleanly, but ActiveState marks them as valid
and delivers them anyway. Just take a look at the PPM Repository
Build Status page for 5.8:
http://ppm.activestate.com/BuildStatus/5.8.html
ActiveState was a good tool at the time it came out, when there
wasn't an easily available, open source C compiler for Win32. Now
that MinGW is available, ActiveState Perl is being surpassed by
Strawberry Perl. Does that mean that NOBODY should use ActiveState?
No, clearly not. If all you need is the core modules or modules that
*do* build cleanly for the PPM, then there's no reason for you to go
out and get Strawberry Perl. Similarly, there are people who use the
ancient version of Perl that ships with Solaris, too, because that's
all they need.
If, however, you want to be able to update to the most recent version
of any CPAN module you want and you wouldn't mind using the
incredibly simple cpan shell to do it, then Strawberry's your Perl.
-packy
--
Packy Anderson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
I'd be dead by 33; well, that was my best guess...
but, hey, here I am this morning.
Singing 'Happy Birthday to Me' as I clean up all this mess,
'Cause I'm left still alive without warning.
In the big boring middle of my long book of life,
after the twist has been told,
if you don't die in glory at the age of Christ
then your story is just getting old...
