[tex-live] external perl on win32

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 15 December 2010 Zdenek Wagner wrote:

 > 2010/12/15 Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:
 > >
 > >
 > > T T wrote:
 > >
 > >> We plan to introduce an explicit option to enable search for an
 > >> external Perl with a default value set to disabled.  Are there any
 > >> users relying on the current behaviour, who would not welcome that
 > >> change?
 > >
 > > I would normally expect to have Active Perl on a PC prior to
 > > installing TeX Live, but I cannot envisage any situation in
 > > which I rely on this fact.
 > >
 > One year ago I tried to run quite a simple Perl/Tk program on a
 > WinXP computer with Active State Perl and it crashed when
 > displaying the very first window. I grabbed Strawberry Perl from TL
 > repository and it works fine. I am afraid that it is difficult to
 > know whether the installed Perl is complete enough. It is possible
 > to write a perl script that will test whether everything is
 > available but it will be a lot of work.

What do you mean?  A Perl script which checks whether everything is
available it needs itself, or a Perl script which checks whether
everything is available what _another_ Perl script needs?

The first case is not so interesting because we can't change other
people's programs.  And the only benefit I see is that it allows to
provide a more comprehensible error message.

If you have the second case in mind, what would you do?

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
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