Hi,
I really like Active State's PPM a lot. Having never likedd compiling from
sources if I can avoid it, I tend to think of PPM as the Perl equivalent of
apt-get for Linux. Both get the job done very well, at least for my basic
needs.
I've noticed PPM has the command upgrade which can be used to update Perl
packages that one has installed. My question is what does the option dash
precious do exactly? The help doesn't give much info and my Googling so far
hasn't turned up any interesting results. Not knowing what the option does,
I've figured out I won't be trying out that option until I know more about
it.
My second question about PPM is whether it is possible to do an unattended
upgrade of packages. I ran the update the other day and discovered that many
packages were available from more than one location. In such a case PPM
always stopped and prompted me for an answer of which one should be used.
Can I set a default choice?
While I do like being notified of these things, it is hard to notice that
more input is requested from me. I often tend to leave the console in the
background and so PPM may have to wait several minutes before I remember to
have another look at it. Being a screen reader user, the focus can be in
only one place at a time. So tiling the windows is not an option in my case.
One thought that struck me would be to make PPM beep, e.g. using the Win32
function or echoing the bell, when it wants more user input from me. Can
this kind of change be made without altering the read-line library or PPM
source code as such? I'm thinking of loading a module on the command-line.
Further more, Ruby's ability of easily extending built-in constructs, though
unrelated, came to mind. IS there anything like it for Perl?
Lastly, the trouble with beeping is that most of it will be redundant
anyway, provided that it does this for each line of input. So maybe it could
do it only when the PPM window doesn't have the focus or after a delay of
say 30 seconds. You could have a countdown timer running in another thread,
when main is blocked in waiting for more input.
Just some thoughts.
I tried looking in the PPm FAQ but didn't find answers to these questions.
By the way, I'm running Active State 5.8.6 on a Win XP Pro machine with all
the latest fixes:
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/
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