in reply to Perl for Windows Mobile ?

you described situation quite exactly.
Now I add my knowledge a bit.

http://perlce.sf.net is a bit outdated with two ways: its wiki become read-only due to site reorganization, and there are no fresh builds there.

But things are not fully stagnated, because development branch of Perl receives updates WRT 'wince' from time to time. Also, mailing list there still used a bit, so there are people who try doing a builds from time to time.
I hope "perlce" mailing list will be created soon at perl.org

As for newer build - perl588 could be built with few modification to perl source tree (changes did not got through maintenance release), so better approach is to use 5.8.2 version, or build your own - this is all doable, see for example this message from perlce ML archive

In the current development branch there were some reorganizations, but mostly things are the same.
So may be even better bet could be to build current development snapshot, it should go more smoothly.

Still, you can try existing binaries, just check your processor with http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/usewinemb/ce/supproc/default.aspx, and get proper binaries.

I am planning uploading newer binaries to perlce.sf.net within approximately a month.
But there are no build of perl/Tk for perl-5.8+ releases, because porting this monster is a great amount of work. perl/tk is available for perl 5.6, and there's no Unicode there.
So only Tcl/Tk-8.4+ (which is freely usable from perl) is available for WinCE platform.

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Re^2: Perl for Windows Mobile ?
by renodino (Curate) on Jul 02, 2006 at 15:19 UTC
    OK, sounds like I've got some work to do. Will your binaries run on Intel XScale CPUs ? (I'm hoping to get a Verizon VX6700)

    FWIW: my need has nothing to do w/ building pTk, or GUIs of any type. My need is actually much simpler/utilitarian: I've built up a spam killer script over the years that does a pretty good job at killing most of the garbage (esp. the more dangerous variety). On my laptop/desktop, I run both that script and Thunderbird, so I'm pretty safe.

    Alas, to the best of my knowledge, the only email client for WinMobile is LookOut!, so my paranoia level is pretty high, and makes running my spamkiller script pretty critical.

    Update: found some other email clients, so now I've got even more work to do <sigh/>

[reply]
      I think this is not very realistic, due to OS limitations.
      Perl build is based on CELIB, which also isn't very robust.
      Mostly you'll be able to run toy scripts, but no daemons etc.

      BTW Is your WinCE version free of Serious Design Limitations?

[reply]
        I have run the older 5.6 on both a Zaurus and a 3G PDA phone, both with smaller memories than the VX6700, and including DBI::PurePerl and a pure perl DBD, so hopefully my much smaller spamkiller script would run OK. But I fear it may be 5.8 dependent (esp. the req'd Net::POP3 modules). And I'd like to run my weblog analyzer scripts, and maybe run ssh from http://www.rainer-keuchel.de/software.html.

        Guess I'll see how far I can get w/ the older version before trying to DIY w/ the latest (even tho it would be kewl).

        BTW Is your WinCE version free of Serious Design Limitations?

        I saw that, and did some more digging (the linked thread is 2 years old), and there are some oddly related issues that popped up during my research (mostly fixed by registry hacks).

        BTW: on perlce, you mention the threaded build is a memory pig... have you tried building with the latest threads changes ? I wonder if the stack tuning would help any ? Also, which version of WinCE were you running ? (I'd be running WinMobile 5.0)

        And even tho I said I didn't need any GUI stuff...do you have any idea if Win32::GUI has any hope of running on WinCE ?

        Anyway, thanks for all the info..

[reply]

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