• WELCOME
• HOMEPAGE
• FEATURES
• GET INVOLVED
• ADDITIONAL MODULES
• HISTORY

Welcome

This is my Perl distribution for MS Windows. Though I'm not a Perl guru developer, Perl is my favorite scripting language. It's not easy to be a Perl developer with Windows these days. The only good Perl distribution I know about comes from ActiveState. I like it, but I find it too limiting. All ActiveState's parts (scripting engine, PPM etc.) are closed source. License is changed to forbid redistribution of the installer (well last time I checked this was several years ago, but you won't have to check it with this distribution anyway). Also you are stuck with ActiveState's PPM in order to get compiled modules (remember unlike Linux and other Unix based OSes you don't have a C/C++ compiler comming with your Windows). I like PPM, but what to do if some module is in CPAN and not in PPM repository? I looked around and found several other distros, but they all were just a custom compiled versions of Perl. No good answer to the question 'How do I add a module?'. Then I decided to create another Perl distribution. This time with a compiler, IDE and no additional license limitations. I understand that comparing to ActiveState is far from easy but I believe it is achievable. Please feel free to send suggestions and bug reports to demosten@gmail.com

Homepage

Official homepage: http://dnperl.sf.net/
Downloads at project home page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dnperl/

Features

Some of the features include:

• Comes with a free MinGW C/C++ compiler used to build the distribution and some free Unix tools. This way you can download and compile CPAN modules freely
• Has a Perl Scripting engine. Thanks to Atanas Kolev!
• Includes formatted help system with table of content
• Open source of all the tools used to create the distribution (license is same as Perl's)
• Optimized for Pentium III and up CPUs
• Several additional modules included
• Optional instalation with EPIC - free Eclipse based Perl IDE with debugger

Get involved

I need all the help you can give! I need your good ideas. I need you feedback and opinion. I need you critics. I need your fixes to my code. I need someone to create some art, so we can have a logo, distinct icon and better looking help. I need someone to make a CPAN module out of Perl Scripting Engine. I'm stoping before I scare all of you!

Additional modules

Here is the full list of additional modules included:

• HTML-Parser-3.56
• HTML-Tagset-3.20
• URI-1.37
• libwww-perl-5.814
• Win32-OLE-0.1709
• Unicode-String-2.09
• Win32-TieRegistry-0.25
• Win32API-Registry-0.30
• YAML-0.66
• PadWalker-1.7

History

version 5.10.0 rev 2 from (13.September.2008):

• Fixed problem with documentation linking and generation. How documentation is generated at the end of the installation. This also led to about 2.5Mb smaller installation
• Added dnperl_setenv.bat which setup the paths for for the distribution
• Now CPAN and CPAN+ shortcuts call dnperl_setenv.bat first, in order to ensure proper setup of the environment. There is a new icon for CPAN too.