[tex-live] external perl on win32

[Zdenek Wagner]

2010/12/15 Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de>:
> On 15 December 2010 Zdenek Wagner wrote:
>
>  > 2010/12/15 Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:
>  > >
>  > >
>  > > T T wrote:
>  > >
>  > >> We plan to introduce an explicit option to enable search for an
>  > >> external Perl with a default value set to disabled.  Are there any
>  > >> users relying on the current behaviour, who would not welcome that
>  > >> change?
>  > >
>  > > I would normally expect to have Active Perl on a PC prior to
>  > > installing TeX Live, but I cannot envisage any situation in
>  > > which I rely on this fact.
>  > >
>  > One year ago I tried to run quite a simple Perl/Tk program on a
>  > WinXP computer with Active State Perl and it crashed when
>  > displaying the very first window. I grabbed Strawberry Perl from TL
>  > repository and it works fine. I am afraid that it is difficult to
>  > know whether the installed Perl is complete enough. It is possible
>  > to write a perl script that will test whether everything is
>  > available but it will be a lot of work.
>
> What do you mean?  A Perl script which checks whether everything is
> available it needs itself, or a Perl script which checks whether
> everything is available what _another_ Perl script needs?
>
The script could check whether the third party perl provides all
modules needed by th script. If not, it will inform the user. The user
then either may try to install them from CPAN or use perl distributed
with TL. I agree with Tomek that it is very good. I need to port my
perl scripts developed on Linux for Windows users. They are quite
complex and run well on TL perl. So I think that trying to use
(unknown) third party perl will be a lot of endless work which is not
worth the trouble.

> The first case is not so interesting because we can't change other
> people's programs.  And the only benefit I see is that it allows to
> provide a more comprehensible error message.
>
> If you have the second case in mind, what would you do?
>
> Regards,
>  Reinhard
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
> Marschnerstr. 25
> D-30167 Hannover                              mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
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>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz