Chris Chiesa wrote:
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.
That's not really a Win32::GUI problem, but for background the CPAN
shell is not a good thing to use on windows with old perl installations.
Even on recent perl installations (5.8.8) I'd personally give in wide
berth, although I read that ActiveState have been working their magic on it.
> 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.
As I say, CPAN shell, windows and perl 5.6.1 is a non-starter. Remember
perl 5.6.1 is very old. ActiveState 5.6.1 (buid 638) is well over 2
years old, and it only has relatively minor fixes from the original
5.6.1 which was released sometime in 2000/2001 IIRC.
Then I tried to use Win32::GUI itself. I found no documentation for it
on my machine as a result of the installation
What version of Win32::GUI, where did you get if from and how did you
install it?
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...
It sounds to me like you might have a pre-v1.0 version of Win32::GUI,
which would SEGV if you didn't provide a -name => WINDOWNAME option to
the constructors.
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...
If you want the source distribution, then it;s available on CPAN. The
current release is V1.05, and can be found here:
http://search.cpan.org/~robertmay/Win32-GUI-1.05/
You'll need some recent windows headers and a C compiler to get it to
work. If you're not familiar with building perl extension modules, then
I wouldn't recommend this as the starting point.
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.
It sounds to me like you're still using a old, broken distribution.
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.
You download a source distribution, so you would need to follow the
instructions for building from source ...
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.
At the start of the README file that you opened there is a section
titled AVAILABILITY - in it it point you to
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=16572
To download the ActiveState PPM distribution.
From that page pick the binary download for Perl 5.6 (although I would
upgrade my perl installation unless I had good reasons not to) - that's
the one labeled Win32-GUI-PPM-5.6 (Release 1.05). Unzip the downloaded
file (you'll find the latest README and the .ppd file inside it, along
with some other useful stuff). Install it following the instructions in
the README under the title "INSTALLING - ActiveState ActivePerl PPMs".
If you still don't have any success, please respond here describing the
exact steps you take, and what happens for each step.
HTH.
Rob.
