Recently in Windows Category
Jan Dubois posted about Microsoft's 3rd Annual Scripting Games, where you can win prizes for writing Perl programs to solve programming problems like "find a word that you can make out of a phone number," and "count the number of characters in a given text file."
I'd enter if there were interesting prizes, but all the prizes for Windows-only software packages. :-(
Adam Kennedy is thinking about the future of Strawberry Perl.
In line with my attitude that the main Strawberry "product" should be conservative, reliable and predictable (I'm going with a rough analogy to Firefox product-wise) I've been thinking a little about how the release tempo should look. My current thinking for Strawberry Perl is to do quarterly releases, with a tentative schedule of releases in January/April/July/October and aiming at being available for download before the second Monday of the month.
In addition, he's asking for your ideas on features to include in the April 2008 release.
Yesterday's article about Strawberry Perl referred to a blog post with incorrect installation instructions. All the downloading and installing discussed is just not necessary, even for CPAN installations. According to Adam Kennedy:
The install and setup process for Strawberry Perl is to uninstall any existing Perl, run the installer, and then run "cpan" or run it from the Start menu. There is no additional installation required.
Note: Beware of the instructions in the link below. It has you do far more work than is necessary. See this follow-up article for details.
Here's the first big blog post I've seen about Strawberry Perl: How to install and set up Strawberry Perl
I am writing this article with much joy and glee.... Active State no longer has a monopoly on the issue of Perl on the Windows platform
I haven't read the Strawberry Perl docs, since I'm Windows-free. The blog post gives details about what tools are necessary to make the install, with links to the tools. Now, I thought that part of Strawberry Perl was that you wouldn't need any external tools, but maybe they're just for building CPAN modules.
Adam Kennedy has released his Strawberry Perl for Perl 5.10.0. Strawberry Perl is the Windows Perl distribution that's an alternative to ActiveState's distribution, and it includes tools for building CPAN modules natively, so you're not tied to ActiveState's PPM repository, which may not include the module you want to install, or may be behind a few versions.
