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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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ActivePerl is almost everywhere now 3 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • There's a certain irony to the Mac version of the PPM library being the most complete and having the highest CPAN coverage, while the Win32 version of ActivePerl has by far the worst CPAN coverage.

    • Certainly somewhat ironic, but there is also a purely technical reason. To provide forward binary compatible PPM packages, the PPM system is building it's packages using as close to the earliest ActivePerl available on that platform as possible.

      That means ActivePerl 813 (5.8.7) for OS X, and ActivePerl 806 (5.8.0) on Win32.

      It also explains the better CPAN coverage (5.8.0 vs. 5.8.7)

      --
      There's more than 9 ways to do it
      • That's not a technical reason, that's a business reason.

        Sacrificing most the usful modules on CPAN to maintain backwards with 5-10 year old legacy version of Perl for what I assume is contractual reasons (correct me if I'm wrong here) is hardly a technical decision, or if it is, it's a bad technical decision.

        On ActivePerl Win32 you end up with.

        No PPI, or anything that uses it.

        No POE, or anything that uses it.

        No WWW::Mechanize, or anything that uses it.

        No Params::Util (so there goes almost everything I've written in the last several years other than the ::Tiny modules)

        No Class::DBI or DBIx::Class.

        No Template Toolkit.

        No DateTime.

        No Params::Validate.

        No Test::Builder::Tester, so more than half of Test:: is dead...

        No Scalar::Util::refaddr, or Scalar::Util::weaken

        Why? Because SOMEWHERE a decision was made to retain binary support for 5.8.0 and break Scalar::Util, which breaks ANYTHING remotely useful.

        It's just now there's no longer anything left TO support.

        I mean, have you TRIED to use ActivePerl 5xx on a Win32 machine with no compiler and only using PPM and get something useful done?

        Do the ActivePerl developers eat their own dogfood?

        Excuse me for sounding a little bitter about this, I had high hopes when you were hired.

        But these days I consider ActivePerl Win32 8xx to be damaged beyond repair. Which is why we needed to create Strawberry Perl.
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