Strawberry Perl is more Unixy in its approach, and I have been always very happy when I've worked with it.ĪctivePerl, however, due to its custom package management system, has been a colossal pain when I've worked with it. ACTIVEPERL VS STRAWBERRY WINDOWSThey were necessary before the community got together and built Strawberry Perl to bring Windows into the "first world" of the Perl ecosystem, but they're not necessary anymore. I appreciate what ActivePerl is trying to do, but I think it's a bottleneck in the development process. ACTIVEPERL VS STRAWBERRY INSTALLStrawberry Perl / CPAN mitigating factor: The Strawberry developers try really, really hard to make sure that everything goes smoothly and that as much of CPAN as possible is available to you, and when modules are identified as trouble spots (difficult to build on Windows, but required for other popular modules/applications), they'll either work with the author to get the module fixed so that everyone can install it, or in exceptional cases, apply their own fixups and bundle the module with Strawberry Perl or Strawberry Perl Professional. Strawberry Perl / CPAN cons: Not everything is guaranteed to build perfectly with the Windows tools. You have new modules the moment the author releases them, and you're using the build system that the author intended. Strawberry Perl / CPAN pros: Your repository is CPAN, not a bunch of binaries maintained by third parties. Solution 3Īmplifying just a tiny bit on Vivin Paliath's helpful answer:ĪctivePerl / PPM pros: If there's a PPM for your version, it's going to work, and simply.ĪctivePerl / PPM cons: There's not always a PPM, or at least not always an up-to-date one. I have done that before and it works reasonably well. On the other hand, ActivePerl is made for Windows and so it works with Windows very well.Īnother option is to install Cygwin and Perl that comes with Cygwin. But I lean towards Strawberry Perl because the environment is closer to Unix and so there are not many incompatibilities. I have used both before and it seemed to work for most cases. Although easier to install than CPAN modules, PPMs are specifically created for Windows and so some CPAN modules will not work (because they do Unix-specific things). You can find PPMs for most of the popular modules so you shouldn't have any trouble unless you are looking for an obscure or really new package (so bleeding-edge stuff won't work because PPM usually lags behind CPAN). The official repository is hosted by ActiveState. I think Strawberry Perl also comes with a few modules that let you install PPMs (Perl Package Manager files).ĪctivePerl installs modules using its own format called PPM (Perl Package Manager). The MinGW distribution comes with gcc, make, ld and other tools to help you build modules. Strawberry Perl also comes with MinGW which means that Strawberry Perl can use quite a few XS modules directly from CPAN without any modification. When things are added to CPAN, you have immediate access to them. Strawberry Perl uses CPAN, which means that you are up to date as far as modules are concerned. This would solve one important (IMHO) disadvantage of Strawberry Perl (compared to ActivePerl). And maybe one can choose the directory where Strawberry Perl gets installed (I couldn't).īTW: for compiling your own Inline or XS stuff, just install the MinGW compiler by ppm (I didn't do that, but it looks interesting).Īddendum: after reading the comment below, I checked Strawberry Perl again and it's now possible to change the installation directory, which is a denoted feature of the 5.12.0 release (which is the actual version). ACTIVEPERL VS STRAWBERRY WINDOWS 7I think I dropped Strawberry Perl after trying to install DBI + DBD::mysql on Windows 7 (which is a no brainer in ActivePerl just click on the ppms and choose install).īut maybe that's solved by now. Even for the Windows version of the Apache HTTP server, there is a precompiled mod_perl (2.0.4) ppm available which will (did for me) work out of the box with ActivePerl 5. This was for me, in the long run, a much better (and more robust) choice. The PPM installer included in ActivePerl allows you to add alternative PPM repositories which will give you access to almost all useful Perl modules available on CPAN - but prepared and tested for Windows. After having used both for years, I'd say, for me at least, ActivePerl is a much more convenient choice.
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