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Free Resources for Windows Perl Development
jamie pointed out an important announcement in the Perl community. Adam Kennedy, known as Alias, developed Strawberry Perl to "make Win32 a truly first class citizen of the Perl platform world." Over the last year, major CPAN modules have used Strawberry Perl to get to releases that work trouble-free on Windows. But the tens of thousands of smaller modules on CPAN are lagging, in many cases because of lack of access to a Windows environment for development and testing. Now Alias has worked with Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab to provide for every CPAN author free access to a centrally-hosted virtual machine environment containing every major version of Windows. "More information (and press releases) will follow, the entire program under which this partnership will be run is so new it's only just been given a name, so some of the organisational details will ironed out as we go. But for now, to all the CPAN authors, all I have to add is... Merry Christmas. P.S. Or your appropriate equivalent religious or non-religious event, if any, occurring during the month of December, etc., etc."
perl is dying http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/38010
Maybe this link will be a little more useful: http://strawberryperl.com/
The CPAN testers was conceived back in May 1998 by Graham Barr and Chris Nandor as a way to provide multi-platform testing for modules. Today there are 2,653,748 tester reports and more than 400 testers giving valuable feedback for users and authors alike.
CPAN modules are probably better tested cross-platform than libraries for any other language.
The problem with CPAN Testers is that while it can tell you IF your module is broken, it doesn't give you any way to actually get onto Windows to debug the problem. All you can does is guess the fix and upload a new release, and hope for the best.
CPAN Testers is the canary in the coal mine, which is handy, but doesn't actually help clear out the poison.
If you'd Read My Fucking Article you'd see that the current set is the MINIMUM initial launch set.
The plan once we are running is to start adding more variations as needed. I'd certainly like to have a 2000 instance.
As for the Windows 95 family, as I understand it support was dropped from the current Perl core for anything older than 2000.
Perl has been a first class citizen on Win32 starting with the GSAR port back in late 90s, then Perl for Win32 and now ActivePerl.
In fact ActivePerl was more up to date than unix Perl during the late 5.005 and 5.6 because the pumpkin was primarily a Win32 developer.
If you want to find the second class citizens in the Perl world look at OS2, Aix, Hpux, and other strange unixes. I know you want to make Perl better and are working hard on it, but insulting the people who put together the foundation you're now working on is misguided. They did a damn fine job.
Not really. ActiveState made bizarre PPM binary compatibility decisions, which meant that their version of Scalar::Util didn't include the XS components. As the 5.8.x series continued, more and more modules relied on that XS component, which meant that increasing amounts of the CPAN weren't available as PPMs. I don't know the exact figures, but it wouldn't surprise me if one-third to one-half of the CPAN were unavailable from AS's repositories.
(Did you know Alias is one of the CPAN administrators?)
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