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

A pretty silly question I suppose but as it's caused me a bit of grief recently, I thought I'd just check here, 'coz I couldn't find anything blindingly obvious(!) using 'super search' or in the ActiveState forums...

I have a running installation of ActiveState Perl 5.8.9 (Build 827) and would consider upgrading to the latest ActiveState Perl, being Perl 5.14.2 (build 14xx).

I went through a sample installation on a non-critical PC and have found that there is no usable version of Tk for any 5.14.x Perl version. As I read it, this would mean I can't upgrade all the way to Perl 5.14.x, given that Tk is a critical module that needs to be available for many of my Perl programs.

This led to the question: Is there a CPAN module or something that will interrogate my current installation and note the (currently ~300) CPAN modules and their versions I have installed... and then see if there are equivalent modules available (in the ActiveState repositories) for a specified Perl version? ppm list can give me a list of installed modules and their versions... but how can I check that against successful CPAN module builds for a candidate Perl version?

Thanks for any forthcoming suggestions.

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Re: How to Easily Check for Available CPAN Modules when Upgrading ActiveState Perl
by dasgar (Priest) on Jul 31, 2012 at 03:49 UTC
    As I read it, this would mean I can't upgrade all the way to Perl 5.14.x, given that Tk is a critical module that needs to be available for many of my Perl programs.

    One easy option is to add the Bribes repository. If you use the GUI version of PPM, the information to add the Bribes repository is already included in PPM. You can see a list of the available modules from Bribes' 32-bit repository and 64-bit repository.

    Of course, if you're going to a newer version of Perl, you've got a few options. First, if you stay with ActiveState's Perl, you can just install directly from CPAN. To do that, you just need to install MinGW and dmake from PPM. After that, you can install modules directly from CPAN.

    A second option would be to go with Strawberry Perl, which already comes with everything needed to install modules from CPAN. I've recently gone with DWIM Perl. This is Strawberry Perl plus additional modules and Padre, which is a Perl-based IDE.

    Is there a CPAN module or something that will interrogate my current installation...

    As for listing your current modules, it's been my experience that ppm list won't list any modules that you installed without using the PPM utility. If you haven't done any of those kinds of installs, you shouldn't need to worry about that caveat.

    If you do some digging around ActiveState's web site, you can get a list of modules and their version and PPM build status for ActivePerl build versions. To check about CPAN modules build success rates on Windows, you can check out CPAN Testers for detailed information.

    Personally, rather than doing all that checking, I would just make a list of the modules that I need, move to a newer version Perl using Strawberry Perl (or DWIM Perl) and just install the modules from CPAN.

[reply]
[d/l]

      Thanks for those suggestions..

      Strawberry looks like it's an interesting option.. but I'll have to (re-)learn all the old POD-style docs and their navigation -- I've been spoilt with ActiveState's HTML/framed doc system that includes help for the installation as well as the actual perl interpreter and modules, etc.

      Seems like I have a lot more to study... as usual..

[reply]

        I know exactly what you're talking about. I myself started out on ActiveState Perl. Like you, I really liked the web-based documentation and never really got into using the line-command perldoc utility.

        If that's what's holding you back from making the switch from ActiveState to Strawberry, then here's a few alternatives that might help out.

        First, I've gotten more familiar with using http://www.perl.org/docs.html for looking things up. That combined with CPAN, it is somewhat similar to ActiveState's web-based documentation system, but not as convenient.

        Secondly, I recently found Pod::POM::Web. According to the Acknowledgements section of the documentation, the module was "deeply inspired" by "the structure of HTML Perl documentation released with ActivePerl". I'd recommend checking it out.

[reply]

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