http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1047521

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

Hello monks.

I was just wondering why ActiveState seemingly takes an inordinate amount of time to release the latest version of Perl, e.g., Perl 5.18.0 was released on May 18th and as of today, August 1st, they are still listing the current version as 5.16.3. I installed Strawberry Perl 5.18.0 in an effort to obtain the latest version of BioPerl (ugh...still 1.6.9) but it is not available for ActivePerl beyond 5.10 and building from source was unsuccessful (build errors).

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: ActivePerl: Slow to release the current version of Perl?
by bioinformatics (Friar) on Aug 02, 2013 at 02:08 UTC
    The BioPerl 1.6.901 release should build fine with Strawberry Perl 5.10/12. I haven't tested much beyond that (It's been awhile since I used BioPerl in Windows!). It will be awhile before you see another release of BioPerl; you can pull in patches from Git, but modules are being moved around and code refactored such that it won't build at the moment. Your best scenario is to use linux and export bioperl-live in your .bashrc, giving you access to the latest code and bypassing the need to build and install BioPerl.

    Bioinformatics
Re: ActivePerl: Slow to release the current version of Perl?
by sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Aug 02, 2013 at 02:29 UTC

    ActiveState and Strawberry are, of course, very different approaches to the rather-challenging task of “providing Perl on Windows.”   Active, corporately speaking, is bearing a much larger and very different burden here:   they undertake to do everything for you, and you wait for them to do it.   Actually a very reasonable approach, but it means that the two systems are definitely Apples/Cumquats.   It seems to me that, if you have a question or concern about Active’s version release timetable, you really need to ask them directly ... and let us know.

      Hi.

      Ok. I emailed ActiveState and inquired about the delay in releasing 5.18.1 and I was told that a stable release would most likely appear this week (which I interpreted as September 22, 2013).

      Hope this helps.
Re: ActivePerl: Slow to release the current version of Perl?
by wee (Scribe) on Aug 02, 2013 at 21:21 UTC
    According to a reply to an unrelated ticket I submitted to ActiveState, there are still "in-progress bugs against the PPM build system for 5.18", and some folks there are on summer vacations. Also, 5.18.1 is about to be released so they are going to make that version their next release.
Re: ActivePerl: Slow to release the current version of Perl?
by Anonymous Monk on Aug 02, 2013 at 00:46 UTC