On the last weekend I was helping a friend getting perl on his computer running. He also needed a mySQL Server. He is using Windows, so we hoped it should become easy, because precompiled versions are almost always available for the Win32 platform.
With the help of my favourite remote application LogMeIn.com I connected to his windows computer with my Mac. Installation of mySQL was done in a few seconds and ActiveState perl, too.
So we copied my scripts to his machine and did the first run which stopped, because some perl modules are missing. Ok, that is normally no big deal and they can be easily installed with the package manager – I thought.
A big suprise came up when I typed in ppm and saw a GUI. Huh? A Interface for modules in perl? Nice done and easy to use, but DBD::mysql is missing.
The next step was to try to use it with the command cpan which gives me the classic command line interface shell of the origin ppm. Installation ran quickly thru, but the packages could not be compiled. So I tried to get the ppd file and that lost success, too.
We solved the problem by recognizing that in perl 5.8+ the drivers are not available at all. Using the GUI ppm and adding the repository
made it. Then we just searched for DBD-mysql and it went thru without any further problems.
I experienced some perfomance problems with the PPM GUI. So I use ppm on command line instead. Unless you type only “ppm” the GUI isn’t used. So “ppm s DBD-mysql” runs on command line.
I would suggest to add trouchelle to you PPM repositories. This repository has a lot of modules listed that are not available in uwinnipeg or activestate repository.
C:\>ppm repo describe 3
Id: 3
Name: trouchelle
URL: http://trouchelle.com/ppm/package.xml
Enabled: yes
Last-Status: 200 OK
Last-Access: 23 hours ago
Refresh-In: overdue
Last-Modified: 1 day and 11 hours ago
Good to have another valuable repository and to know that ppm can be still used as command line using the s option. You can reach the same by typing cpan instead. On my Mac everything went so smooth.