Perl Binary Distributions from Siemens

[perlnewsbot]

Our lovable CPAN librarian, jhi, writes in that Siemens has released SiePerl, a binary package of perl 5.005_03 for Linux (Intel RPM), Solaris (Sparc pkgadd), and Win32 (Zip). It includes a lot of prebuilt modules, and will periodically be updated by the kind folks at Siemens Business Services as the included modules (and, once in a while, Perl) get updated. http://www.cpan.org/ports/ has 'em all.

News listed above comes from www.news.perl.org © Copyright 2000, Chris Nandor. All Rights Reserved.

[rrwo]

Has anybody tried this yet? See http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/G/GR/GRAHAMC/.

The distribution includes DBI, DBD::ODBC modules, which makes a lot of sense (I don't know why ActiveState doesn't make that the default for Win32 ports).

It includes RTF::Document and RTF::Group... nice to have some of my modules included but 1. nobody asked me (*) and 2. both are horribly buggy. O(h yeah, RTF::Group is an experimental module that has no use without the as-yet unreleased generator modules.)

Too bad it's only version 5.005.

UPDATE: (*) I did E-mail the maintainer of the build.

Also noticed Spreadsheet::WriteExcel, Storable, FreezeThaw, GD, GDGraph, and some other useful non-standard modules.

It has potential if they're supporting and encouraging Perl.

[tilly]

IMNSHO, the fact that it is version 5.005 means that they did their research. That is a good sign.

[ybiC]

I'm tinkering with use of SiePerl as we speak, er type.

What I hope to get from it is Perl on my couple Win2k boxes - without the limitations of PPM and ActivePerl.   Soon as I figure out dmake, nmake or such on Win2k, I should be able to use CPAN modules beyond those included in the distribution or available with PPM.   8^)   I was about to embark on compiling Perl source, so this should save me some work.

But I see no reason to use it with OS's that already include Perl, like on my trusted Debian hosts.
    cheers,
    Don
    striving for Perl Adept
    (it's pronounced "why-bick")

[rrwo]

I've gotten ActiveState to work with CPAN modules, but it takes a lot of tinkering and mixed results. Also, installation of Cygwin and few Unixish extras floating around like ncftp etc.

The biggest problem I find is that some bleeding-edge module versions don't compile or they fail tests if they do compile with Visual C++.

[belg4mit]

WTF do you mean nobody asked you? It's on CPAN, and seems to have the same license as perl. You don't need to be asked. If you didn't want people using it don't upload it to CPAN.

[Graham]

I have recently updated SiePerl to Perl 5.6.1 on Solaris / Linux / Win32 platforms, containing all the same modules as the 5.005_03 release plus a few more... Available as before from http://www.cpan.org/ports