TGI has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Is it possible to install ActivePerl 5.10 and Strawberry Perl alongside ActivePerl 5.8?

I have an existing ActivePerl 5.8 install that I must keep operational. But I also need to evaluate 5.10 in its various forms. I don't have a spare machine on hand to work with.

Does anyone have suggestions, success-stories, or tales of woe to offer?


TGI says moo

  • Comment on Parrallel installation of ActivePerl 5.8, Strawberry and ActivePerl 5.10

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Parrallel installation of ActivePerl 5.8, Strawberry and ActivePerl 5.10
by randyk (Parson) on Dec 28, 2007 at 03:09 UTC
    I have 4 versions of ActivePerl (builds 638, 802, 822, and 1001) existing on the same machine in different directories, chosen at installation time; all it takes to switch amongst them is adjustment of the PATH environment variable.
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Re: Parrallel installation of ActivePerl 5.8, Strawberry and ActivePerl 5.10
by syphilis (Archbishop) on Dec 28, 2007 at 06:10 UTC
    No problems at all. As randyk pointed out, it's just a matter of setting the path appropriately. For that I just run a batch script whenever I open a cmd.exe console. If I want to use Strawberry Perl I would run strawberry.bat - if I want to run ActivePerl build 1001 then I run ap1001.bat, or ap822.bat for ActivePerl build 822, etc. I find that a lot easier than typing in the appropriate path amendment (which I usually can't remember anyway)

    Cheers,
    Rob
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Re: Parrallel installation of ActivePerl 5.8, Strawberry and ActivePerl 5.10
by shenme (Priest) on Dec 28, 2007 at 18:49 UTC
    Strawberry Perl currently will always install into C:\strawberry\ , which doesn't overlap the default directory for ActiveState Perl.

    When installing ActiveState Perl, at the third step "Custom Setup" when it asks what features you want, it also shows the defaulted "Location: C:\Perl\" and a 'Browse' button next to that. Click that button and change the location to whatever you want, such as "C:\Perl51001\". You can do that with any of the ActiveState installs.

    And as Rob mentions, I also have batch files to switch my DOS window to the desired version: pathperl510s.bat , pathperl588.bat , pathperl561.bat, etc. 

      rem Add Perl 5.8.8 to path
  path C:\Perl588_822\site\bin;C:\Perl588_822\bin;%path%

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Re: Parrallel installation of ActivePerl 5.8, Strawberry and ActivePerl 5.10
by adamk (Chaplain) on Jan 02, 2008 at 11:23 UTC
    Officially (for reasons I won't get into now, but basically because I say so) Strawberry Perl cannot co-exist with any other Perl installations on the same machine, including cygwin.

    So from an officially-supported corporate-friendly perspective, my recommendation is that you install Strawberry 5.10 on a virtual machine (VMware, etc).

    If you are happy to void the warranty (to the extend that we have one) then the above recommendations seem fairly reasonable.
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      Officially (for reasons I won't get into now, but basically because I say so)
      Because you've made mistakes :D
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