It's too late to help you, but I just got an advisory warning that the latest versions of ActiveState Perl are seriously broken.
So, yeah, it looks like avoiding them for a while might be a very good thing.
- Ozymandias
Update: Here's the text; not an official advisory, but a warning from someone I know and trust:
Activestate Perl 5.6 build 613. Stop! If you haven't downloaded this version of Perl for Windows. DON'T! The Perl Package Manager (PPM) section is fatally broken. If you don't need the ability to install or update modules I guess you can go ahead and download this. But otherwise. DON'T. Yes, they have a "Hotfix" that updates PPM to version 1.1.4. But it doesn't work. The PPM commands install, verify, update, search, and query do not work both before and after installing the "fix". What's worse is that Activestate has known of these problems for at least two months but is not saying a thing about it on their website (except for what is displayed on the bug tracking server). If I were them, I would immediately pull this distribution and wait until all of the problems were resolved rather than letting people blindly download this thinking it is a stable release. An extreme WTF experience.
Since I got the warning, I've heard again from him that other things are broken; although he didn't mention pack or unpack, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if there's even more screwed up than he mentioned.
