I have Activestate 5.6.0 on Win98SE. My copy of ppm.xml appears to be broken. No luck with Super Search, Goggle got me a few hints but no full answer, so here I am.

When invoked from the command line, ppm now comes up with no options set: no repositories, etc. With no repositories, attempts to search or load new packages simply display a new ppm prompt. Dropping a few traces into the code seem to show that it *is* finding ppm.xml.

So on the theory that ppm.xml is broken, I tried loading it into Internet Explorer. The display stops in mid-stream with "Reference to undefined entity 'Atilde'. Line 313, Position 650". Looking at the end of the file, I see the closing </PPMCONFIG> tag that marks the end of the file. So it seems to all be there. Just (apparently) broken.

So it would appear that I need to rebuild the file. Yes? No? What are my options? How do I do this?

Anticipating advice to just do a fresh install, let me ask about how things work with the new html help file format people have written about. A while back I read here about the new format not providing for a way to incorporate doc pages for user-installed modules from other sources. What's the word on this?

Also, I use one of the ActiveState Help File utilities available here on PerlMonks but I understand these are incompatable with the new help file format.

In reply to Broken ppm.xml on Win32 by dvergin

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