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.
That happened to me after I tried running ppm and ppm3 concurrently. ppm comes and goes when intermixing the two, but ppm3 always works. Don't forget to read the many ppm pod pages (the html pod, has at least 3 on my last count).
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.
Don't even bother, it's not worth the hassle;
So it would appear that I need to rebuild the file. Yes? No? What are my options? How do I do this?
I was wondering about this just in case, but apparently it's not come up before. Did you try just deleting the file? setting the repositories by hand, and then installing modules? There is no utility as of yet to scan /perl/lib and perl/site/lib for installed modules and create a ppm.xml Check out and see if you have /perl/site/lib/ppm-conf and then look for ppminst.bat, and see if that helps
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?
Just go ahead and do a fresh install, or toy with the PPM module, SYNOPSIS

 use PPM;
 PPM::InstallPackage("package" => $package, "location" => $location, "
+root" => $root);
 PPM::RemovePackage("package" => $package, "force" => $force);
 PPM::VerifyPackage("package" => $package, "location" => $location, "u
+pgrade" => $upgrade);
 PPM::QueryInstalledPackages("searchRE" => $searchRE, "searchtag" => $
+searchtag, "ignorecase" => $ignorecase);
 PPM::InstalledPackageProperties();
 PPM::ListOfRepositories();
 PPM::RemoveRepository("repository" => $repository, "save" => $save);
 PPM::AddRepository("repository" => $repository, "location" => $locati
+on, "save" => $save);
 PPM::RepositoryPackages("location" => $location);
 PPM::RepositoryPackageProperties("package" => $package, "location" =>
+ $location);
 PPM::RepositorySummary("location" => $location);
 PPM::GetPPMOptions();
 PPM::SetPPMOptions("options" => %options, "save" => $save);

[download]
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.
I've seen more than one monk wonder about this and it is all myth. The HTML version of the pod remains.

What was distributed was a .chm (ActivePerl.chm, core pod), which is a compiled (cold fusion I think) help file format for win32 platforms, and since it is compiled, it's not readily updatable, but who cares, HTML pod remains, as well as perldoc, we don't need no stinking binary (if you download the .zip version, this is not included as far as I can see ~ I removed the MSI version, installed the .zip one, the help file went bye bye)

What's more, now bundled is the incredible Pod::Tree module, and pod2html has been reimplemented using Pod::Tree. In addition to pod2html, as a part of Pod::Tree, there also comes perl2html and pods2html, just check out the Pod::Tree dist to see what i'm talking about. There are some minor portability issues with some of the apps (like perl2html), but they work well. podmaster has one of these issues documented on his homenode, and I have emailed the author a few times (the modules work great, it's the ".bat"s that are problematic, like perl2html has the line split ':', $ENV{PATH}, and then attempts to read each of the dirs in the path, which obviously won't work on windows.

Well, I hope I cleared up some things, bye now.

 
______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;"

In reply to (crazyinsomniac) Re: Broken ppm.xml on Win32 by crazyinsomniac
in thread Broken ppm.xml on Win32 by dvergin

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