Hi gang.
I'm new, having been asked by Robert to join and post a summary of
problems I've been having, obtaining-and-installing Win32::GUI. This is
probably going to be LONNNGGG, so please bear with me.
First off, I'm running ActiveState Perl 5.6.1 on a WinXP Home laptop,
and my onboard CPAN facility (the whole "perl ?MCPAN" thing) does not
work. The CPAN facility in fact has NEVER worked on this machine, either
in the original incarnation of the OS _or_ its current incarnation (I had
to replace the HDD and reinstall the OS, this summer). It almost seems to
me that the specific failure mode "now" may be different than the failure
mode "then," but I can't be certain.
But I digress. For those interested, although it's not really
Win32::GUI-specific, the nature of the current problem is this: the first
time I try to use CPAN to install a module, I get a series of messages
indicating that various files --
\.cpan\sources\authors\01mailrc.txt.gz
\.cpan\sources\modules\02packages.details.txt.gz
\.cpan\sources\modules\03modlist.data.gz
-- are not retrieved from www.perl.org (or www.cpan.org or whatever the
URL is that it uses; I don't have a capture of that). On all subsequent
attempts to use CPAN, the above-mentioned files are reported as not
containing what they're supposed to. Sure enough, inspection shows that
the files EXIST but are EMPTY (0 bytes). Other errors follow in a
cascading manner.
I started a Usenet (Google Groups) thread about this much of the
trouble, which can be found at
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.perl.modules/browse_thread/thread/135655c7e4cd34c0/c45e322bfbc1b4dd?lnk=gst&q=CPAN&rnum=1&hl=en#c45e322bfbc1b4dd
. The first "useful" response amounted to, "I never use CPAN; use PPM
instead," so I tried PPM. Sure enough, on an install Win32::GUI command,
PPM reported complete success. Yay!
Then I tried to use Win32::GUI itself. I found no documentation for it
on my machine as a result of the installation -- but having encountered
undocumented freeware before, I assumed this was normal and that I would
just have to "bushwhack" -- i.e., figure out the usage by reading through
the code. My first few attempts at this caused the Perl interpreter
itself to "SEGV" (reported as such, though I suspect that's not really the
right term for it on a Wintel system) -- but I figured that was just
because I wasn't using the thing properly. Still, in retrospect, bad Perl
usage shouldn't cause the _interpreter_ to crash...
Around this time I spoke with a Perl-guru friend of mine, who said he
didn't know much about the -MCPAN facility and suggested I simply go to
the CPAN website and download desired packages directly from there. Now,
I have a hard time making sense of the CPAN website, navigating, finding
what I want, etc., so, while I'm _pretty sure_ I got to the right place
for Win32::GUI, for all I _really_ know, I could have instead blundered
into some half-completed or long-abandoned "alternate universe" or
forgotten backup copy, where the projects are incomplete and covered with
a thick layer of dust...
Be that as it may, I did find some files and docs. The first thing
that caught my interest was a tutorial; I figured I should try a "known
good" Win32::GUI program first, before claiming that my installation
didn't work. But alas -- upon typing in the "Hello GUI World" example and
trying to run it, I found that it, too, "SEGV'd" the Perl interpreter --
on the call to AddLabel(), for those following along at home. So I
pressed on and encountered the README file and a downloadable .tar.gz
file. From what I could tell, this .tar.gz file was the ONLY downloadable
item in the area, so I downloaded it, and found in the README that to
install Win32::GUI I should first uninstall any previous installation (so
I did) and then issue a command along the lines of
ppm install ___.ppd (I believe; maybe it was ___.ppm)
-- where the specified .pp{whatever} file was to be found in the download.
Unfortunately, examining the content of the download once I had it on
my machine, I found that there was no such file in it, and concluded that
I couldn't issue the command as instructed.
At this point I have no idea what else to do, or whether I am in some
way responsible for my own troubles. I don't see any other file to
download, and I don't know any other way to install the package starting
from a downloaded file. Is it possible that specifying ___.ppd (or
whatever) to a "ppm install" command, somehow "invents" such a file from
the content of the archive, and that I should just try it even though
there's "no such file in the archive?" Or am I on totally the wrong
track? I just don't know.
That's the sitch as of now; thanks for reading this and thanks in
advance for any assistance.
Chris Chiesa
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
