Perl 5.8 on WIn32 vs perl56.dll, DBI and ODBC

NetWallah has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Having struggled for almost 2 hours to resolve this issue, I thought I might share what I have learned, and perhaps help other monks who may need to deal with this.

This issue has been discussed in the thread DBI, Windows and Perl56.dll error but I don't think that thread identified the root cause.

The symptom: The simplest DBI open connection causes the popup message box complaining about the missing "perl56.dll", and the open fails. Basically, DBI is broken at this point.

Here is my understanding of the situation. I would welcome wiser meditations by monks with a better understanding of module implementation.
DBI and ODBC guts are implemented in \Perl\site\lib\auto\DBI\DBI.dll and \Perl\site\lib\auto\Win32\ODBC\ODBC.dll.
These dll's have perl<version>.dll hard-coded in them, where <version> is the version of PERL that the DBI and ODBC modules were installed with.

Hence, if you upgraded from perl 5.6 to 5.8, and did not re-install the modules, they would still want to link to the old perl DLL, and fall apart, if the old perl was absent.

Moral of the story - Re-install all modules when you install perl.
Side-story : my ppm no longer works - it complains about no valid targets, although all target settings are legitimate. Hence, I have had to manually re-install modules. Hope this helps the next monk who encounters this.
Cheers

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Re: Perl 5.8 on WIn32 vs perl56.dll, DBI and ODBC
by crazyinsomniac (Prior) on Jul 01, 2003 at 05:51 UTC

These dll's have perl<version>.dll hard-coded in them, where <version> is the version of PERL that the DBI and ODBC modules were installed with.

compiled

linked

binary compatible

As for your PPM troubles, http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/ActivePerl/PPM/ says:

The PPM config file, ppm.xml, got corrupted and PPM no longer works properly.
If this occurs, a new minimal PPM config file can be generated using the 'genconfig' command at a Command Prompt:
C:\> ppm genconfig > ppm.xml
The new ppm.xml should be copied to the directory Perl/site/lib. PPM should now work properly, but all information about previously installed packages will be lost.

______crazyinsomniac_____________________________
Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.
perl -e "$q=$_;map({chr unpack qq;H*;,$_}split(q;;,q*H*));print;$q/$q;"

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Re: Perl 5.8 on WIn32 vs perl56.dll, DBI and ODBC
by bunnyman (Hermit) on Jul 01, 2003 at 15:39 UTC

Moral of the story - Re-install all modules when you install perl.

Re-installing only the binary Perl modules should be good enough.

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Re: Perl 5.8 on WIn32 vs perl56.dll, DBI and ODBC
by NetWallah (Canon) on Jul 01, 2003 at 16:19 UTC

G:\Perl\site\lib>ppm genconfig > ppm.xml
Unknown or ambiguous command 'genconfig'; type 'help' for commands.
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G:\Perl\site\lib>ppm
PPM - Programmer's Package Manager version 3.1.
Copyright (c) 2001 ActiveState SRL. All Rights Reserved.

Entering interactive shell. Using Term::ReadLine::Stub as readline lib
+rary.

Type 'help' to get started.

ppm:AvtivePerl5> targ desc
Describing target 1 (AvtivePerl58):
        Path: G:\Perl\site\lib\ppm-conf\ppminst.bat
        Port: 14533
        Type: Local
ARCHITECTURE: MSWin32-x86-multi-thread-5.8
         CPU: x86
    LANGUAGE: Perl
     OSVALUE: MSWin32
   OSVERSION: 4,0,0,0
    PERLCORE: 5.8.0
 TARGET_TYPE: perl
     VERSION: 3.05
 Rebuildhtml:
        Root: G:\Perl\
     Tempdir:
ppm:AvtivePerl5> install dbi
Error: no suitable installation target found for package dbi.
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