Boxed Perl or ActiveState Perl?

[Vittorio]

On my dual-boot (linux debian testing & windows xp) box under linux I
have installed debian testing and the deb perl 5.6 packages boxed with
the debian distribution.

Now, using perl both under linux and win xp I've installed activestate
perl 5.8 under M$ win and it looks great!

The same activestate site offer a debianized perl-5.8 package which is
installed under usr/local/bin.

In the opinion of more experienced users than I am is there any
advantage for me to install activestate perl instead of the standard deb
packages?

Can both versions of perl coexist?

If I install activestate perl, could I eliminate the boxed debian perl
packages (to avoid duplication, of course) or they're essential for the
installation?

Ciao

Vittorio

 

[gnari]

On my dual-boot (linux debian testing & windows xp) box under linux I
have installed debian testing and the deb perl 5.6 packages boxed with
the debian distribution.

Now, using perl both under linux and win xp I've installed activestate
perl 5.8 under M$ win and it looks great!

The same activestate site offer a debianized perl-5.8 package which is
installed under usr/local/bin.

In the opinion of more experienced users than I am is there any
advantage for me to install activestate perl instead of the standard deb
packages?

I believe that debian testing is using perl 5.8, so probably the easiest
would be
# apt-get install perl
which will upgrade your perl to the current testing version along with
all dependencies

Can both versions of perl coexist?
yes


If I install activestate perl, could I eliminate the boxed debian perl
packages (to avoid duplication, of course) or they're essential for the
installation?

perl is used by many debian administration tools, but I have no idea if
they would happily use a /usr/local one instead of the debian one.

but as one of debian's strong points is its package system and
painless upgrading process, I would stick with their packages.


gnari

 

[Bart Lateur]

perl is used by many debian administration tools, but I have no idea if
they would happily use a /usr/local one instead of the debian one.

Dunno about Debian but...

In general, it's considered a bad idea to replace the perl that is used
by the system, by a custom one. Leave it there. If you don't like it
(because it's buggy, unextensible, whatever..) *add* a different
distribution on a different location. You're still free to choose for
your scripts which one to use, by changing the shebang line.

 

[GreenLight]

On my dual-boot (linux debian testing & windows xp) box under linux I
have installed debian testing and the deb perl 5.6 packages boxed with
the debian distribution.

Now, using perl both under linux and win xp I've installed activestate
perl 5.8 under M$ win and it looks great!

The same activestate site offer a debianized perl-5.8 package which is
installed under usr/local/bin.

In the opinion of more experienced users than I am is there any
advantage for me to install activestate perl instead of the standard deb
packages?

With ActiveState on Win32, they have the ppm tool which simplifies
package installation (no need to compile modules locally):
ppm install File-Slurp
Maybe they have the same thing for Debian. That would be one benefit
to switching, IMHO.

Can both versions of perl coexist?

If I install activestate perl, could I eliminate the boxed debian perl
packages (to avoid duplication, of course) or they're essential for the
installation?

I don't know anything about Debian (I use *BSD), so I cannot help you
there.