Does perlbrew work on Windows?

Question

Using ActiveState 5.8.8 on Windows XP, I would like to install a more recent Perl for testing/migration.

Revere

Might be faster to just try it. Install App::perlbrew from CPAN and perlbrew init. Might have better luck using Strawberry Perl which comes with a complete build toolchain (make, a C compiler, etc..). – Cytotaxonomy

I wouldn't mind trying that but I'm afraid of messing up my existing installation, which would be very bad. – Revere

So back it up. The whole AS installation is contained in one directory. – Jaquelinejaquelyn

David Farrell created berrybrew to make it easy to install Strawberry Perls. – Ilo

Answer 1

Someday, we'll be out of the days when we thought we were limited to only one computer. When I want to test this sort of stuff, I make virtual machines. I keep a clean, base installation around, make copies of that stuff, configure them in multiple ways, and blow them up however I like.

If I do something bad, I can either go back to the base installation easily or revert to a snapshot. I have several Windows VMs for just this use (and that they run faster as VMs on my newish Mac versus my old $300 HP tower).

This isn't just advice for ActivePerl. Developers should have lots of VMs if they can't get or don't want lots of hardware. You set up the VMs as test machines instead of using your "personal" machine (with all of your personalizations, music, whatever) as a test machine.

As for the literal question: I don't use perlbrew on Windows, but it was easy to find these:

• perlbrew and cygwin
• Open Issue 31 in Strawberry Perl
• berrybrew, the perlbrew for Windows.

Note that you'll need a compiler toolchain to turn the perl source code into the executable since perlbrew assumes you have all of the unixy things.

Ilo

I can understand why I'd get the accepted answer, but I hope that someone comes along with an explanation to make it work on Windows and the checkmark can transfer to that answer. :) – Ilo

Answer 2

Recently, an alternative appeared:

berrybrew - The Windows Strawberry Perl version manager

It is basically perlbrew for Windows using Strawberry Perl.

Tartlet