Free Resources for Windows Perl Development 117
jamie pointed out an important announcement in the Perl community. Adam Kennedy, known as Alias, developed Strawberry Perl to "make Win32 a truly first class citizen of the Perl platform world." Over the last year, major CPAN modules have used Strawberry Perl to get to releases that work trouble-free on Windows. But the tens of thousands of smaller modules on CPAN are lagging, in many cases because of lack of access to a Windows environment for development and testing. Now Alias has worked with Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab to provide for every CPAN author free access to a centrally-hosted virtual machine environment containing every major version of Windows. "More information (and press releases) will follow, the entire program under which this partnership will be run is so new it's only just been given a name, so some of the organisational details will ironed out as we go. But for now, to all the CPAN authors, all I have to add is... Merry Christmas. P.S. Or your appropriate equivalent religious or non-religious event, if any, occurring during the month of December, etc., etc."
Re:Netcraft confirms it (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not netcraft. Its the TIOBE index, which is notorious for being completely inaccurate. Google for "tiobe flawed" and you'll start to see just how worthless it is. That said, perl does have some serious challenges ahead if it wants to stay as popular or gain popularity.
What about ActivePerl? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've used ActiveState's ActivePerl on several windows boxes over the years and have had "trouble-free" experiences with it. Granted, some of the more bleeding-edge modules weren't at the latest revs but the mainstream software I used didn't strictly require those either.
Re:More like lack of interest. (Score:4, Interesting)
Having a lot of testers doesn't seem to actually affect the quality of many of the smaller modules. Many of them have absolutely insane dependency chains, requiring both untested, unreliable modules, often from the same author, and completely deprecated modules for the same component, with massive duplication of modules to do the same small task in slightly different ways.
For the core modules, and those exciting modules likely to be included in the next release, I can see the results of testing work. But many of the smaller ones are one-off debris by sloppy programmers that unfortunately show up in the CPAN search engines. No one seems to test them, and they're apparently not tested again after their original publicaton for compatibility with new perl releases.
Re:AKA Alias? (Score:3, Interesting)
If one is forced to use an Alias for online life, might as well make it obvious...
Re:What about ActivePerl? (Score:5, Interesting)
My issues with ActivePerl have been that it is fundamentally different to all the other Perl platforms (you don't get the full CPAN, just binary packages) and that because one company is the central gatekeeper of all the binary packages, there was never a reasonable way for CPAN authors to debug their modules.
I for one wrote 150+ modules, of which a grand total of 7 were available on ActivePerl, due to various bugs in the ActivePerl build farm that went unfixed for years.
To be truly first-class, you should be the same as the other platforms, not similar-but-different.
Sign me up! (Score:4, Interesting)
I maintain a few modules on CPAN. Nothing big, I'm the sole author.
In August, I got email from someone complaining that one of these modules doesn't pass its self-tests. After some back and forth, it turns out that it passes on Linux and fails on Windows. They even submitted a patch, but I don't want to integrate it unless I can test it on Windows.
I've got some Windows machines in my house, but I'd have to put together a usable development environment, and it's a hassle, and I've got a day job, and it just hasn't happened in 4 months.
If Alias et. al. can get me access to a Windows environment, this module could get cleaned up a lot sooner.
Re:win32 a first-class citizen? (Score:1, Interesting)
I think someone needs to get their head out of their ass and face reality. Outside the desktop, Windows isn't visible? Really? Windows Mobile is everywhere. ...
Yes, and that someone is ... you! I'm guessing you didn't see the news Friday that Windows Mobile was just passed in market share by ... the iPhone!
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=iphone+q3+2008+market+share
The problem for fanbois who point to Microsoft's size as a sign of its invincibility is that ... size is not a sign of invincibility.