Hi All,
  ActiveState have been bugging me recently on a few points. I'm feeling increasingly frustrated with them. Having not had much luck contacting them, I thought someone here might be a part of ActiveState or at least be able to tell me what's going on over there.

The final straw was today. I've got a client on Windoze who is very worried about security. The software I've sold them uses Perl and MySQL, for MySQL I was able to point them to the enterprise server which comes with security updates, etc...
I looked at ActivePerl enterprise, couldn't find a price, so tried calling... Couldn't get through, just voicemail. So I filled in their request form, which pointed to a PHP script (personally I thought that was a bit off) which gave me a MySQL socked error!!

So absolutely no luck there then.

Previous annoyances have been their ppm repository which comes with absolutely no web image support. I can understand not having gif support because of the license, but why not have the JPEG and PNG libraries so that at least Imager (which currently auto builds with only support for BMP, etc) can do web graphics.

I submitted a bug to them over a month ago which hasn't received a response. Considering that most bugs from years ago haven't had a response, I'm not expecting one. I even offered fix the problem myself so they wouldn't have to do anything.

My idea then was to create a machine that mimics their autobuild process, so I can figure out build problems for people and help them get there modules into ActiveStates default repositiory. I emailed them about this... Got totally ignored.

So know I'm really wondering what's going on with them, as then seem to be aimed towards messing up Perl on Win32.
Is strawberry perl our last hope?

I feel I should mention that I tried Komodo and was very impressed with that.


Lyle

Update: Just been reading article on Sophos buying ActiveState for 23M in 2003, then selling for only 2.25M 2 years later. I get the strong feeling ActiveState has had it's very profitable parts taken away and been left struggling for ends meat...

In reply to What's with ActiveState?? by cosmicperl

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