Yes, we know. :(
Right now, 5.8.x and 5.10.x versions of Strawberry Perl are "hardcoded"
builds. (There's a bug in Perl that's preventing us from making a
"pick-your-install-location" (I call it "relocatable") installer for
those versions of Perl:
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=73562 )
[ActiveState chose not to add modules (other than their own PPM
installation environment) to the perl core, so they don't use the
"vendor" directory - we do, so we do.]
I need a little help walking through the Perl source in order to fix
this bug - my C skills are rusty and not entirely up to the task.
The soon-to-be-version 5.12.0 does not have this bug, and a relocatable
installer for it is currently in beta testing. (a version based on
5.12.0-RC0 is available at
http://strawberryperl.com/beta/, but if
you're wanting this for a client, I can't recommend it. A second beta
based on the final 5.12.0 bits should be available within 7 days (and
hopefully sooner) of those bits being released (they're currently on
RC4, with plans to release the bits this Saturday, from what I'm told.)
It should be "out of beta" and recommendable by May 15th or so. (I
usually give new versions of Perl a month to settle in place.)
Given that, there are two things that were done for previous versions,
and will continue to be done for future 5.8.x/5.10.x versions:
1) There's a version that installs to D:\strawberry instead of
C:\strawberry available at
http://strawberryperl.com/releases.html (the
link at the text "Other D: drive, ZIP, and Portable editions" on the
main page)
The question of "Why are more drives not available?" is that it takes
about 90 minutes of building for each drive (and 30-40 minutes of
uploading per file uploaded - my build machine is on a rural United
States DSL connection) on a 2009-era desktop - that and I have to have
something attached to the drive letter in question that's writeable to
build to. Beyond D-drive builds, the number of people requesting
additional drives is minimal. (The build times end up at 150 minutes on
a 2005-era desktop, and 270 minutes on a 2005-era laptop, for
comparison. The process is IO-bound for the most part.)
2) There's a "portable" version (for USB-stick use) available at the
same location. It's not the easiest to use, but it's getting easier.
If either of those versions don't suit, the software we use to create
the installer itself is (mostly) on the CPAN (the rest of it is on
Sourceforge, but one of the parts that's on the CPAN will download and
install that part for you) and you could use that on your own machine to
create an installer that installs to a location of the client's choice -
I can assist you in doing so.
If you build your own installer, and if there are particular modules
that your client wants installed that aren't already in the Strawberry
installer, you could add those to the installer if you wish. (The
assumption being that they'll build on Strawberry Perl in the first
place - you may wish to check that before saying yes to those requests!)
Hope that information helps you.
--Curtis Jewell
--
Curtis Jewell
csjewell@cpan.org
http://csjewell.dreamwidth.org/
perl@csjewell.fastmail.us
http://csjewell.comyr.org/perl/
"Your random numbers are not that random" -- perl-5.10.1.tar.gz/util.c
Strawberry Perl for Windows betas:
http://strawberryperl.com/beta/
