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

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...

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: What's with ActiveState??
by gwhite (Friar) on Apr 29, 2008 at 15:07 UTC

    I am hoping Strawberry will wake them up a little, they have been the only game in town for Windows up until now. Strawberry does have its complications, right now I am dealing with if you want mySQL support you have to compile mySQL on your Windows box (or at least download the source and pretend you compiled it). I know this is really a DBD::mysql issue but Strawberry is solving a bunch of other issues, this seems to be something Strawberry could simplify.

    Back to ActiveState, I also keep wondering what they are working on, it is not making a Perl programmers life easier on Windows.

    g_White
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Re: What's with ActiveState??
by Herkum (Parson) on Apr 29, 2008 at 15:27 UTC

    I think that they have been moving a lot of their focus away from Perl to support Python and Tcl(but mostly Python).

    I loved their editor, Komodo, for doing Windows development but it still has some quirks for some Perl stuff. Basically, all the new features for supporting other languages, not so much fixing old stuff.

    Also, if you take a look at their ppm repository, it has grown to be quite stale. Very few packages are updated anymore.

    If I were to set up another machine I would use Strawberry Perl hoping I would not have to deal with the headache of getting a plethora of modules installed via ppm and cpan, at the same time.

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Re: What's with ActiveState??
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 30, 2008 at 04:56 UTC
[reply]
      Fill out the form. It submits to a PHP script. That was giving me a MySQL socket error yesterday.
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