[Bioperl-l] Re: Installing Bioperl on Windows 98 [AND] Cygwin vs ActiveState Perl Programs

[Lincoln Stein]

I believe you can create your own PPM distributions.  There is support there 
in the ExtUtils::MakeMaker and subsidiary modules, although I've never tried 
it.  Basically there are a bunch of keys that should be added to the 
Makefile.PL.

It's worth discussing whether it is worth it to make a PPM for BioPerl 1.00

Lincoln


On Tuesday 18 December 2001 22:23, Chris Devers wrote:
> On 18 Dec 2001, Elizabeth Bowen wrote:
> > I was just wondering, since most BioPerl people tend to use ActiveState,
> > if there were any issues between using either Cygwin or ActiveState for
> > BioPerl which makes one more advantageous than the other, or is it just
> > a matter of choice?
>
> From my limited exposure to Win32/Perl, it seems like the ActiveState
> distribution is more or less standard, and deservedly so, since it seems
> to be well tested & supported. On the other hand, it seems like you're
> pretty much locked into AS to provide you with PPM versions of libraries
> that you might want to use, and I was never quite comfortable with that.
>
> Using Cygwin seems to force you to build everything yourself (??), but
> then ...you get to build everything yourself. You don't get to have a
> third party porting & testing things for you, but then you don't have to
> be held back by such a third party either. For mainstream sysadmin type
> Perl use, sticking with ActiveState probably makes more sense, but for
> more esoteric, bleeding edge stuff like BioPerl, it might be worth it to
> go with Cygwin.
>
> But that's just my impression, and like I say I've only dabbled in Win32
> Perl -- I could be way off base here. In any event, I would think that
> once you have the same versions of the same libraries running, there
> should be too much of a difference in the coding APIs you'll deal with. I
> would think you'd only have problems with compiling / running custom
> non-Perl modules, but even then the problems should be that bad.

-- 
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Lincoln D. Stein                           Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
lstein@cshl.org			                  Cold Spring Harbor, NY
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