Perl 5.10.1

Currently I run 5.8.8 in production on all servers that I manage. I do have Perl 5.10.0 running locally on my Mac but only for playing with.

So first step is to load Perl 5.10.1 on my Mac (Tiger) alongside my other Perl’s and then start testing & with the plan to roll it out to replace 5.8.8 in the not too distant future.

These are my steps to load 5.10.1 locally so that it doesn’t conflict with any other Perl I have here:

• Download & unpack Perl source code in my normal user login
• ./Configure -de -Dusethreads -Dprefix=~/local/Perl/perl-5.10.1/
• gmake
• gmake test
• gmake install-all

I now have Perl 5.10.1 running out of my $HOME directory.

This all worked fine except the default location of .cpan directory was in $HOME (~/.cpan). This could clash with other locally installed Perl if nothing is done so I amended everything in cpan shell to use ~/local/Perl/perl-5.10.1/.cpan instead (I did this using “o conf”).

I then quickly blasted my new local Perl 5.10.1 with a few CPAN modules which included:

• Moose
• MooseX::Declare
• autobox::Core
• DateTime
• XML::LibXML
• Devel::REPL

All modules I selected installed without a single hitch. CPAN comes up trumps again!

Devel::REPL was of great interest to me because when I last tried to install this on 5.8.8 & 5.10.0 I did have some problems.

This time it installed & worked wonderfully. Only slight issue was there was no command line history? (ie. readline). This was easily resolved by loading Bundle::CPAN (which also gave cpan shell history as well!)

Padre

Normally I don’t compile Perl with threads. However I needed it for Padre, which is something I forgot about when I last tried installing Padre on my local 5.10.0

I installed the following CPAN modules into my new Perl 5.10.1:

• Alien::wxWidgets
• Wx
• Padre

All compiled & installed seamlessly. On starting Padre I got a nice pretty butterfly splash screen but then unfortunately it crashed

As with most things in life if you not starting off with a clean slate then it may cause problems. I had some residue stuff from previous attempt that was part of the problem.

Two things were needed resolve this stumbling block:

• Remove WxWidget which was installed via MacPorts (sudo port deactivate wxWidgets)
• Make sure new Perl 5.10.1 was first Perl in $PATH env variable. Because even though I was running 5.10.1 CPAN shell the Wx module seemed fixated on picking up Alien::wxWidgets from the first Perl it could get its hands on

After this reinstalling the Wx & Padre modules gave me a fully functional Padre.

Parrot 1.0 / Rakudo / Perl6

I was now using Padre 0.48 to edit & run my Perl 5.10.1 code. Want I wanted now was to add Perl6 into the mix.

For this I just followed the instructions from Rakudo site and installed it in my local user dir with no hitch at all.

Next in Perl 5.10.1 I installed the Padre::Plugin::Perl6 to make Padre Perl6 aware. My first bit of Perl6 code ran from Padre & command line perfectly (don’t forget to add your rakudo path to $PATH env):

use v6;

for 1..10 { .say }

class Dog {
    method bark { "woof" }
}

my Dog $rover .= new;
my $spot = Dog.new;

say $rover.bark;
say $spot.bark;

So where do I stand with Padre? Well I do love my Textmate so it is going to be hard to tug me away from it.

But I love the idea of an editor being hosted and extensible in Perl. So come my next round of free time I may find the tugging from Padre just to strong to resist

/I3az/