[Pdx-pm] Perl Development on Windows

David Pool dpool at hevanet.com
Fri Dec 24 15:51:38 CST 2004


On Fri, 2004-12-24 at 10:42, Eric Wilhelm wrote:

> In the three hours that I spent dealing with Perl on a Windows box, 
> the most frustrating thing is the braindead shell (which is 
> frustrating regardless of whether you're using perl or not.)  The ppm 
> install system is okay, as long as you only need modules that are in 
> the ActiveState repository (but it looks like there are a lot of 
> them.)  If you are trying to do anything with XS or Inline (compiled) 
> code, you need to have the Visual C/C++ compiler to be compatible 
> with the ActiveState build.  I think I saw something about the Visual 
> compiler being available for free now (though it's only the 
> command-line version, (so what's visual about it?))

Nice :-)

> 
> Given all of those issues, I don't think I'd try it without cygwin.  
> Then, you get the gnu tools, bash, cpan, tab-complete, etc.
> 
> I know it's the smartass answer that everyone expects, but I think the 
> way to make it "as good as possible" is to ditch windows.

Yeah, I keep coming up with this one myself...

> 
> I setup a Linux box (Debian) in the middle of a windows network, and 
> just let everyone that needs to run the code ssh or vnc into it.  For 
> about $800, you can get something that will do the job really well 
> and be able to remote-admin it (I only have to install/sync to one 
> box, and it supports several simultaneous users.) That works really 
> well, and keeps me from having to worry about windows-specific issues 
> in Perl (I haven't tried it enough to ever run into them, but the 
> reading always seems to imply that there are quite a few (e.g. 
> binmode(), fork(), etc.)  But, I guess the internals guys are bending 
> over backwards to make windows act like a real system, so maybe it's 
> not too bad.

I don't know if this will be an option, but it's helpful to know when we
get to the "switch to linux" conversation.

Thanks everyone, all the comments have been a great help.

d



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