in reply to New-to-Perl: recommendations for windows setup?

bliako:

I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I'm partial to installing cygwin and its perl. It works pretty well for what I do. It makes for a pretty decent *nix-like environment, with mintty for the terminal/console.

I've heard pretty good stuff about strawberry perl, but I haven't managed to install it such that it works seamlessly enough with cygwin for me. (Though I haven't tried recently, and don't recall what my issues were. Maybe I'll try it again the next time I (re)build a Windows box, and see if I can get more success next time.)

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

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Re^2: New-to-Perl: recommendations for windows setup?
by syphilis (Archbishop) on Feb 17, 2021 at 00:30 UTC
    I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I'm partial to installing cygwin and its perl.

    I installed Cygwin about 5 years ago - and I still use it on a daily basis for ssh, git and svn.
    The worst thing about it is its setup.exe - which you might need to use extensively if you want to install all of the modules that ship as standard with Strawberry Perl.
    I'm damned if I know how it's supposed to work. I've got a procedure written down that does work if I follow it religiously, but it involves closing and re-starting setup.exe, which is ridiculously clunky.
    Maybe I was doing it wrong and/or maybe it has since been improved.

    The other annoyance was that it didn't provide a sufficiently recent version of autotools, for which I switched to using my Ubuntu box, and then scp the result across.
    I'm still using the Ubuntu box in that way even though I would expect that, by now, a sufficiently recent version of autotools is available for Cygwin via setup. (Such is my fear of the dreaded setup.exe ;-)
    I wonder if they're a "bit behind" with other software, too - or was it just autotools ?

    Cygwin's perl is fine, and easy enough to build from source - though I rarely use it as native Windows perls (both self-built, and Strawberry) provide all that I need.

    Cheers,
    Rob
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Re^2: New-to-Perl: recommendations for windows setup?
by bliako (Abbot) on Feb 16, 2021 at 20:26 UTC

    I remember trying to install cygwin a year ago in some other machine but something failed while compiling things: I think at linking it was looking for .so files instead of .dll. And I quickly gave up since it was just an experiment. Thanks for the suggestion. If it eventually works, a bash-like windows terminal sounds great.

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      G'day bliako,

      I went through this process about 18 months ago. I asked similar questions to you and, like you, I got a lot of replies. It ended up a rather long thread; read it all if you want; here's my three main posts:

      Here's a brief, non-exhaustive, overview of features:

      • The Win10+Cygwin provides a Unix environment. It's not substantially different from the Linux (OpenSUSE) machine I use for $work.
      • I run bash on a mintty xterm (Cygwin64 Console). It provides a vi interface on the command line (set -o vi in ~/.bashrc). It has all the usual Unix commands and utilities.
      • I have Perlbrew installed. I initially used this to install Perl 5.30.0; I subsequently used the same to upgrade to 5.32.0 and later to 5.33.5.
      • I run an X Server with Cygwin XLaunch. Perl Tk programs work fine with this. (There's actually 16 X Servers available.)
      • I access many open source applications via aliases: soffice file.docx (LibreOffice); foxit file.pdf (Foxit); and so on.
      • I have an Apache webserver set up. Other webservers that are started by Perl web frameworks, e.g. Dancer2, also work without any problems.
      • I run network-related utilities, such as ssh and git, almost every day.
      • ... and so on ...

      In the main, I've had no trouble installing Perl modules. One issue I had, took me a while to sort out: "cpan: Terminal does not support AddHistory.". With another, I needed help from fellow monks: "Update XML::LibXML - can't find "xlocale.h"".

      There's a number of open source applications that I access directly from Win10: Firefox; Thunderbird; Vlc; and others.

      I use this setup five days a week for $work; and seven days a week for my own projects. Overall, I'm very happy with what I have.

      I felt this was getting overly long; I could've written a lot more. Please ask if you have any specific questions about things I haven't touched on, or areas where you'd like further details.

      — Ken

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        kcott thanks for sharing your homework! And you do introduce another iceberg: Tk and X-server.

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