Re: Cygwin vs. Active State Perl Install

My vote is for the ActiveState distribution. The main reason is that PPM means that you tend not to need a compiler to install many of the common modules. Obviously there are some modules that require a C compiler but they tend to be less mainstream and some of the repository maintainers take requests so they can do it for you if you ask nicely!

The one thing that I would point out is that the PPM builds on ActiveState are built automatically and need to pass all of the tests before they are released. I have noticed that some of the modules are at quite old versions compared to CPAN. For example - Activestate has a much older version of WWW-Mechanize than the University of Winnepeg.

Comment on Re: Cygwin vs. Active State Perl Install

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Re^2: Cygwin vs. Active State Perl Install by yburge (Acolyte) on Apr 25, 2006 at 19:12 UTC
Please forgive my ignorance, but I have (at least) one question about compilers...how do I know if any of our modules actually need a C compiler? And is "modules" the correct term? We have about 3 dozen batch scripts, and I know that there are some "default" modules which come with various Perl downloads, but I haven't yet grasped the concept of Perl modules yet (I'm OBVIOUSLY new to Perl, and I'm trying to learn it at the same time I'm converting our batch scripts).	[reply]
Re^3: Cygwin vs. Active State Perl Install by GrandFather (Saint) on Aug 24, 2007 at 20:02 UTC
A module is a code library. Modules are generally written to provide a solution to some common task, although they are often written internally as a way of managing large projects. Pure Perl modules are generally simple to install and use regardless of the Perl installation you are using. XS modules include code written in C and need an appropriate compiler for part of the install process. They can be much harder to install because they need to be built on the target system during the install process. ActiveState avoids the XS build issue by providing a tool (ppm) that downloads precompiled modules and installs them. Cygwin provides a nix environment and, with an appropriate compiler, can build and install XS modules from CPAN using the usual nix tools. I suspect that for your task you found ActiveState to be the way to go and probably didn't need to install very many additional modules in any case. DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel	[reply]