For both AS and Strawberry perl you download and run the installer, both are straight forward processes. If you have a 64bit system (as we see with the question which kicked off this thread) AS can not automatically install and configure MinGW and the build tools. Strawberry ships with this (and much more) as standard and requires no extra input from the user. In conclusion for installation, AS only supports this on 32bit Windows platforms. Downloading and configuring MinGW could be considered tricky for a novice.

As for the 'unfamiliar utilities', with the exception of AS having a PPMGUI, they're the same regardless of platform, cpan, PPM, C compiler etc. Regardless of which you choose configuration will be required for PPM/cpan if you're behind a firewall or have strange networking issues.

I find that Strawberry ships with a more feature complete development environment (see the release notes). Of course, you're mileage may vary.

On the subject of PPM repos the last time I looked, which was some time ago, the numbers of active repos was static and support for new perl releases was lacking. Apart from the ActiveState repos this may still be the case. I'm not sure if the non AS repos have mirrors to mitigate against outages for whatever reason, questions have been asked here in the past about this.

Paying $999 per OS installation, per year for access to AS repositories for what they consider to be 'older' versions of perl seems expensive to me. The fact they want to charge for their services is not surprising, they're a business after all, however most people I run into who hit this issue are running the community edition in violation of section 4 of the license, in so much that they're using it for production systems and find that they can't access AS repos. In such cases I advise that they either pay for the product they are actually using or switch to Strawberry Perl. I've yet to see someone fork out the money the rather than just download the latest community edition and start installing their modules again, or move to Strawberry.

I just don't know what AS brings to the party nowadays.

Update: Fixed typos.

In reply to Re^4: CPAN Module Installation (aka Oh, God, Here We Go Again) by marto
in thread CPAN Module Installation (aka Oh, God, Here We Go Again) by marinersk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.