scr53005

Without error details, all we can do is guess. You might try giving us a trivial program that causes the error, and give us the complete error message. Then someone would have a place to start guessing from. As it is, we can only make guesses.

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...roboticus

Hi roboticus,

Thanks for trying to answer. I was actually hoping someone has direct relevant experience with settings that approach mine (DBD-Pg.dll on Win2k with ActiveState Perl).

There are NO error details to provide, as can be inferred from my message : perl.exe crashes, I get a windows box with a useless message "Address violation at 0x534721789 : the memory cannot be read" (or something like that).

The "ideal answer" I was hoping for went along the lines "I use DBI + DBD-Pg.dll without problems on Win2K with ActiveState 5.10 (or 5.12)" - then I could upgrade my perl installation and try again.

The "anti-ideal answer" would have been "I use DBI + DBD-Pg.dll without problems with ActiveState 5.8.8 on Win XP. Tried it on Win 2K and it caused perl to crash as well." - then I would know there is no solution for me since I can't change the OS ...

Try DBD::PgPP. (PP means pure perl. No compiler needed.)

There's only one file to install PgPP.pm, and that only needs to be copied into the right place in your perl installation.

But it is only a stop gap. In the long term, you need to sort out your perl environment.

• Try installing on a windows box with net access and see if you can get it to work there then copy files (easy)
• See if anything in Installing DBD::Pg on Windows XP Pro 32b is applicable (in particular Re: Installing DBD::Pg on Windows XP Pro 32b)
• Try upgrading/downgrading Postgresql (to get a different .dll)

Thanks for your suggestions.
However, I have no need to make this work at home. It would be helpful if I could make it work at the office, where unfortunately I can't change the OS (it's Win 2K and there's nothing I can do about it) and I can't freely access the web either (I can do some downloads but not everything). The post you pointed me to encounters an "upstream" problem (compared to mine) : the driver cannot be located. In my case, the driver is located and loaded but it looks like there's some incompatibility between the various libraries since perl.exe crashes

Regards,
Sorin

Maybe this helps?

dbdpgppm project at pgfoundry.org

Ok, problem solved, thanks to all who replied
The answer is : it doesn't work with ActiveState 5.8.8.817, but it works with ActiveState 5.8.9.827.

rearranging the .ppd should be like a red herring

There was some progress ...
Went to pgFoundry and downloaded the files under DBD-Pg-2.10.0-Perl5.8 : the .ppd and the .tar.gz
I think they were never really tested with Perl5.8 :
- the .ppd did not work, I had to re-arrange it (removing the <DEPENDENCY name="version" ...> line)

- the package itself did not work either, got at first crashes in Pg.pm because it stated 'use version;' and 'our version = qv(...' and neither are valid in perl 5.8
- after I took these out (not really needed) I got the "install_driver(Pg) failed : Can't load '...Pg.dll' for module DBD::Pg ..." error. After searching for wisdom on this error I found a solution : place all PostgreSQL dlls in the PATH. This indicates to me that the PostgreSQL dlls should be bundled with the DBD::Pg package because I want to run the perl script on a machine that does NOT have PostgreSQL installed but instead connects to a remote DB.
Anyway, after copying the relevant DLLs fron the PostgreSQL machine to the one where I want my perl script to run, I relaunched and ... (here it becomes interesting) ... it exploded with a Windows error msgbox saying :

"The procedure entry point Perl_sv_2iv_flags could not be located in the dynamic link library perl58.dll"