If these things are easy for you to work with, than you are a better/smarter/wiser person than me. Personally, getting Xerces.pm, LibXML and up-to-date binaries of GD and Apache/mod_perl configured the way I want them has been beyond my threshold for pain. Yes, there is Cygin, but on my ancient (1 & 1/2 years old) machine it is very slow. The fact that Visual C++ 6 is the tool of choice for working with open source code on Windows is enough for me to say feh and move on. On my linux server compiling things from source, just the way I need them, while, granted, is a chore, is within my lazy, diehard win3.1/norton desktop using grasp.
Four years ago I was at a crossroads: I could either go down that path that I was most familiar with, namely IIS and ASP, or I could follow my heart and commit to working with Open Source tools such as FreeBSD, Apache and Perl. I chose the later. While my job has been focused with developing on these platforms, my development desktop for some reason (Photoshop) has remained Windows and Mac. Enough is enough. Time to grow up. I can always dual boot back to MS when I need to. Maybe when I got 10 grand to burn I'll go to OS X, but in the mean time...
()-()
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I haven't got a clue what Xerces or LibXML are or why anyone would want to use them, but installing and using other XML modules was easy and straightforward enough, insofar as using XML is easy (YMMV). GD is certainly a doddle, plug and play all the way, as is apache and mod_perl. 3 minutes to download and install, edit the configs and Bob's yer uncle. I can't imagine what arcane configurations have pushed you beyond your pain threshold.
As for Cygwin, as I said, my machine is three years old (450 MHz I believe) and the cygwin tools all run quickly for me. About as fast as they do on any Linux or Solaris box, although i haven't timed them specially.
On the other hand, I wouldn't touch IIS and ASP with a ten-foot pole.
Regards,
Helgi Briem
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