Which Perl for Windows 98?
January 10, 2004 5:13 AM   Subscribe

Which Perl for Windows 98? [more inside]

I'm writing a script to munch some RSS (my del.icio.us bookmark feed) and output it as Javascript for inclusion as a blog sidebar. I've got something working on Linux using XML::RSS::Parser. The problem? ActiveState Perl's version of XML::RSS::Parser is pretty out of date compared to the CPAN one, installing CPAN modules with perl -mCPAN doesn't seem to work with ActiveState as I have no make command, and Cygwin's Perl seems to crash regularly installing CPAN modules. Should I:

a. Rewrite my script to work with the older version of XML::RSS::Parser
b. Install the new XML::RSS::Parser on ActiveState, using Cygwin's make
c. Install the new XML::RSS::Parser on ActiveState, using some sort of CPAN-to-PPM tool
d. Wave a dead chicken and hope Cygwin's Perl works eventually
e. Raise my hands in despair, and shake 'em like I just don't care?
posted by arto to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)
 
Did you try Veen's way of using XPATH and Perl?
posted by riffola at 5:34 AM on January 10, 2004


I know we seem to be collectively trying to avoid too much thinking out of the box on Ask but if make is all you need to build the module, rather than flailing around for a new Perl or new module maybe you could consider installing make? That may very well work better than Cygwin, which is notoriously unstable on Windows 9X (yet somehow rock solid on the various NTs -- how do they DO that?).

If that doesn't work, maybe you could ask someone with a more complete Windows build environment to build it for you. I don't know anything about building ActiveState PPMs, but I bet one of the machines around here will at least get the module built, and hand packaging it can't be too awful. Drop me a line if you hit nothing but dead ends.
posted by majick at 7:32 AM on January 10, 2004


(Oh, and -mCPAN isn't the only way to build a Perl module. You can also just download the source tarball and -- if it has no binary components -- place the .pm files in the proper location. And if it does have binary components, that's where plain old make and a compiler comes in.)
posted by majick at 7:34 AM on January 10, 2004


I would do b), or install the module by hand (which is really easier if you don't have Cygwin in the first place). Modules are nothing but ".pm"s (with possible includes) or whatever the precompiled module extension is. I would also not run Win98.
posted by azazello at 1:19 PM on January 10, 2004


You should also be able to use the Perl Package Manager which comes with ActiveState Perl. This is pretty much the Win32 equivalent of perl -MCPAN -e shell. Just type 'help' to get a listing of the commands.

That said, I've often found simply manually replacing the .pm files is my installation method of choice.
posted by John Shaft at 6:27 PM on January 10, 2004


Response by poster: Thanks for your help, all--unzipping the CPAN package tarball in the appropriate place did the trick.

riffola: That XPATH technique looks interesting--I might play with it later. Right now, though, I've got it working as is using XML::RSS::Parser.
posted by arto at 3:54 AM on January 11, 2004


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