[Catalyst] PPM vs CPAN

[Carl Franks]

You may want to look into Vanilla / Strawberry perl as an alternative
to ActivePerl.
It includes the mingw (gcc) compiler and nmake, and the perl included
is compiled from scratch with mingw, rather than ms compilers.

http://win32.perl.org/wiki/index.php?title=Vanilla_Perl
The files are here (get the .exe) :
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=158775&package_id=178164&release_id=393299

Vanilla Perl is officially experimental because until a few months ago
some of the core modules were a bit flakey on windows, but I use it
full time for development and running catalyst under fastcgi / apache
and have no problems.

The quite recent site http://win32.perl.org has a news item added
today by Adam Kennedy, saying he's hoping to get a new release of
Vanilla Perl and also an initial alpha of Strawberry Perl both out
today.

Strawberry perl in just Vanilla Perl, but with an up-to-date
Bundle::CPAN, and IO / LWP modules - so it's considered a more
realistic 'basic' version, rather than vanilla, which is really
targeted at people wanting to do CPAN testing.
http://win32.perl.org/wiki/index.php?title=Strawberry_Perl

Anyway, as I said, I use Vanilla Perl, and have had very little
trouble getting everything installed using CPAN.pm - no more trouble
than occasionally crops up with other platforms - and the problems
that exist have been getting fixed with-a-vengence these last few
months.
It doesn't come with PPM.pm, but I've written a script that will
download PPM's from Kobes' repository and install them for me - I
think the only modules I need to do that for are DBD::mysql and
Image::Magick. PPM's are just archive files though, so it's easy
enough to extract the files from.

The next distribution will be Chocolate Perl, which will include a lot
more useful modules, including everything that comes with ActivePerl
(including PPM.pm) - hopefully we'll get an alpha of this out this
year.

On 29/06/06, Nilson Santos Figueiredo Junior <acid06 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Also, unless it's something absolutely necessary, I'd suggest you
> against deploying it in a Windows server. It's somewhat of a hassle to
> get mod_perl or FastCGI working correctly under Windows, the best I've
> got so far is running Catalyst under Apache::Registry, since mod_perl
> crashes when using PerlModule directives and I can't manage to even
> compile FastCGI and it's related Perl module and the built-in server
> becomes really slow if you need to support IE clients directly
> connecting thanks to the necessary -k switch.

I use a binary fastcgi apache module which I downloaded from the
fastcgi website.
I can't remember whether I had problems compiling FCGI.pm - maybe
that's one of the few I had to get a PPM for. If you use PPM.pm, make
sure you add Randy Kobes' cpan mirror repository.

If anyone has problems with compiling/installing modules on windows,
it'd be really appreciated if you could report the problem on
rt.perl.org, and post a note on the "Compatibility List of Perl
Modules" wiki page, so people know to chase it up.
http://win32.perl.org/wiki/index.php?title=Compatibility_List_of_Perl_Modules

Cheers,
Carl