Re: perl development OS of choice

[Elian]

If you're not wedded to your hardware, I'd recommend picking up a Mac and using OS X. You get all the goodness of a BSD, plus a descendant of NeXTStep (one of the nicest development environments for a C family language ever), plus a GUI that really and truly fails to suck.

[hydo]

I agree completely. I used NetBSD and Linux for a long time to do development but since I started using MacOS X, I have to say that i'm pretty spoiled. Perl, Apache, etc. are all installed by default. Add fink and you have pretty much everything that you could want. And yes, the GUI is very nice and quite well thought out. Plus you can use quite a few applications not normally found on *nix boxes. Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash (Natively I think), and others.

I cant help but say again that fink is _awesome_. I installed it and somewhat as a test of how quickly it would break, I typed "fink install enlightenment" and damned if it didn't download and compile everything that I needed to run it in X. Well, that's not completely true. I had to run 'fink install xfree86-rootless' to get the X server just how I wanted it but I can now switch back and forth from Aqua to X with a cmd-opt-a. All of this on a MAC. That to me is about 20 different kinds of cool.

[mrbbking]

Another benefit to Mac OS (X or otherwise) is the most excellent BBEdit text editor. It's truly incredible, and quite inexpensive as far as non-free software goes. There's a freeware version, too.

How many syntax-coloring text editors get lines like
s#/usr/bin/python#/usr/bin/perl#;
correct? BBEdit does. It even supports Emacs key bindings, if you're into that sort of thing...

I am in no way involved with BBEdit or it's publisher, apart from being a very satisfied customer.

[rah]

With apologies to my MacOS X brethren, I would not recommend it as my first choice. Don't get me wrong, I love my i-Book running OS X, but the case insensitive filesystem has caused me some grief, I can't get 5.6.1 to build (stock version is 5.6.0) which makes using CPAN a pain (always wants to start off by installing 5.6.1 and fails). Also, as has always been the case with MacOS, the tiny installed base means you are always a bit behind the rest of the world.

At work I use Linux for stuff I will deploy on HP-UX or AIX and have had few problems, but Linux is not UNIX. BSD is, and since you target host is BSD I will side with the other BSD voices on this one.You can run FreeBSD or NetBSD on even older hardware. To run MacOS X you'll need relatively new/fast stuff.

[Elian]

The CPAN issue's a generic problem with the old CPAN module--the first thing you should do is install the latest CPAN, and it takes care of that. It's an old CPAN.pm issue long since fixed. (Just fixed after 5.6.0 was released) The installed base is far less tiny than you might think, too. OS X does have some issues with some of the ancillary libraries (like Curses) but I've not had problems with anything that I've not had problems elsewhere with.

(Linux, though, is unix, as much as any other unix out there)

[rah]

I could continue to argue the Linux is not UNIX point, but since the OP asked that the thread not become a holy war I will refrain.

Appreciate the tip on the CPAN.pm. Bit of a chicken/egg dilemma, but I think I can get around it. Now if you could just tell me how to get 5.6.1 to build (or when 5.8.0 will be released), I'd be all set :) Although only a minor version difference (5.6.0 vs 5.6.1) I would really like to get my development boxes in sync with my production environment. Thanks again.