Grant Update: Corporate, Embedded, and Multi-user Perl on Windows
Sun, 14-Mar-2010 by
Alberto Simões
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<p>Curtis Jewell just sent <span class="caps">TPF </span>an update on his grant:</p>
<p><i>The 5 main points of my grant, as far as releasing an improved Strawberry Perl, were:</i></p>
<p><b><i> </i>"Is compiled as a "merge module" (.msm) file that can be included in other .msi files, as well as an independent .msi file."</b></p>
<p><i>This was done as of the January 2010 release of Strawberry Perl, although I'm not publicizing it heavily until the April 2010 release.</i></p>
<p><i>However, the "Strawberry Perl Professional" alpha that was released in late February uses the merge module that was generated by the January 2010 release as its "underpinnings", and the currently-released-on-CPAN development versions of the Perl::Dist::WiX/Perl::Dist::Strawberry creation toolchain can create and use merge modules.</i></p>
<p><b>"Can have the base drive (and possibly directory name) passed in to the merge module."</b></p>
<p><i>It turns out that you insert the merge module under a directory entry, so completing the merge module made this automatic. However, this isn't useful without the next point.</i></p>
<p><b> "Can be installed to any drive (the top directory may still be named "strawberry" under the root of the selected drive)"</b></p>
<p><i>This is what I'm working on currently for the April 2010 release, as well as being able to build a 64-bit version of Strawberry Perl (for 5.11.x+ versions of Perl - which means a non-beta 64-bit version may not be available until May or June)</i></p>
<p><i>The intention is to release a beta with this (I think of it as "relocatability") working soon after 5.11.6 or 5.12.0-RC1 is released.</i></p>
<p><i>Unfortunately, I've hit a bug in Perl 5.10.1 - it doesn't relocate the vendor/lib directory like the other two standard directories: http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=73562 . I'll need some assistance (i.e. a patch that fixes that bug, or guidance from p5p if more information is needed) in order to get 5.10.1 to relocate safely.</i></p>
<p><i>5.11.5 relocates all 3 standard directories, so it's fine, and I can test that relocation works with 5.11.x versions, until a patch can be created for 5.10.1.</i></p>
<p><b> "Separates the modules installed with the initial installation from modules that the user / administrator installs, by using the "vendor" directories for module installation that can be configured when compiling Perl."</b></p>
<p><i>This was done in the October 2009 release of Strawberry Perl. This has created a problem with implementing the relocation portion of the grant, as noted above.</i></p>
<p><b>"Includes a script that saves the settings that local::lib creates within the Windows Registry."</b></p>
<p><i>A first draft of this is currently in Adam Kennedy's svn repository (it needs debugged) as http://svn.ali.as/cpan/trunk/App-local-lib-Win32Helper/</i></p>
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