bcrowell2 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a piece of open-source software (http://www.lightandmatter.com/ogr/ogr.html) that I wrote to run on Unix, but that also runs on Windows. Actually, I should say "ran," because apparently my installer script is broken in ActivePerl 5.8. Distilled to its essence, my installer script just looks like this: 

use PPM;
PPM::InstallPackage("package"=>"Date-Calc");

[download]
with more lines to install more packages. I don't run Windows, so unfortunately I'm getting this report second-hand, without the exact error message. I've searched all over ActiveState's site, but no joy. I did find this this post on a mailing list, but it's short on specifics.

Can anyone help? Thanks in advance!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: ActivePerl 5.8 breaks PPM scripts?
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Dec 02, 2003 at 00:32 UTC

    What is the exact error message?

    The code you provided is missing a colon. Is that a transcription error?

[reply]
      I have checked his install_win.pl script, which has exactly the problem chromatic described - just a typo:
      do_ppm("Date-Calc");
...

sub do_ppm {
  my $what = shift;
  print "Installing $what...\n";
  PPM:InstallPackage("package"=>$what);
  print "...installed.\n";
}

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
      The code you provided is missing a colon. Is that a transcription error?

      D'oh! Now that's really strange -- my actual script only has a single colon, and yet I've run it on Windows using ActivePerl, and it always worked. Weird! Thanks for the sharp eyes! So actually, it's possible that ActivePerl 5.6 just didn't care about the syntax error, while 5.8 did.

      What is the exact error message?
      Unfortunately I don't have a Windows machine, so I'm just basing this on a user's bug report. He said something nonspecific about "undefined or uninitialized values."

      I guess I'd better beg or borrow access to a Windows machine so I can test whether the :: is really the whole issue. Thanks for the sharp eyes, chromatic!

[reply]

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