Wish Setup would accept my Perl

[Andrew DeFaria]

Brian Mathis wrote:
> On 11/6/07, Andrew DeFaria <Andrew@defaria.com> wrote:
>> Would you similarly complain that you already have del and dir and 
>> not want rm and ls?
>>
>> Personally I dislike ActiveState Perl. Things like setsid just don't 
>> work and signal handling is not reliable (that may be better). Plus 
>> things written for ActiveState sometimes don't port easily to 
>> Linux/Unix. This is not the case with Cygwin's Perl.
> I must say with respect that if there are problems porting from 
> Activestate to linux/unix, that's a problem with the programmer who 
> wrote the code, not Perl.
Not necessarily. If I write code that uses setsid, for example, on Linux 
and then move it to Windows, ActiveState returns "Not implemented on 
this architecture". That's a problem. If, however I use Cygwin's Perl it 
works fine... On the same architecture. Hmmm...
> There's no reason that code that's general in nature would not be 
> portable. 
Granted, any Perl script printing out "Hello World" will probably port. 
The much more interesting case is any Perl script of any size and worth.
> Of course, anything that uses specific Windows services could not be 
> ported.
Obviously, same visa verse too.
> ActiveState Perl works very nicely (and the alternative is what, 
> vbscript?) on Windows. 
No the alternative is Cygwin's Perl on Windows, of course. Oh, and BTW, 
how much $$$ does ActiveState Perl cost? And how much was Cygwin's again?
> I have a feeling the last time you used it was a long time ago, 
> because signals, threading, ans everything else works quite well -- 
> but opinions for or against are really off topic from the OP.
I admit I have not used it lately except to say that I regularly use 
IBM/Rational's ccperl and cqperl which are derived from ActiveState. And 
although I have not been doing signal handling code lately nor writing 
daemons I'm always miffed that ActiveState Perl's debugger doesn't pay 
attention to normal debug set up commands, etc. In any event, no I have 
not been particularly interested in dropping a bunch of money on a 
product that if nothing else, behaves differently when I can use a 
perfectly fine and much more standardized Perl in Cygwin that behaves a 
lot more like the Perl I'll find on Solaris or Linux, etc. This way I 
don't have to constantly tell my clients to spend more money on yet 
another tool that I can already get for free.

As for opinions being OP, I beg to differ. But then again, that would be 
also considered OT by you... ;-)
-- 
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
Assassins do it from behind.


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