[Bioperl-l] Module issue with cygwin-perl vs. Activestate Perl

[Jonathan Cline]

I recently mentioned working on Bio::Robotics for Tecan.  Vendors
being MS-Win specific, the vendor software allows third-party software
communication through a named pipe (the literal filename is
"\\\\.\\pipe\\gemini" where the multiple front slashes are MS specific
and this pseudo-pipe is opened with sysopen() ).  This is broken under
cygwin-perl due to cygwin's method of handling paths -- the sysopen
fails.  However it works under ActiveState Perl and communication
through the named pipe (to the robot hardware) is OK.  The standard
workaround is usually to use cygwin bash, and force the PATH to use
ActiveState perl.  (Typical MS Windows incompatibility problem.)  The
issue is:  Perl module libraries for CPAN work under cygwin-perl
(only?).  Attempts to run "activestate-perl Makefile.PL" for CPAN
module use, or "make test", result in a bad list of incompatibility
problems.  Yet ActiveState Perl is required for communicating to the
vendor application (unless there is some workaround to raw filesystem
access in cygwin-perl that I haven't found in 2 days of working this).
  The stand-alone scripts I have work fine to access the named pipe
(using ActiveState Perl) since the standalone scripts have no module
INC dependencies, no CPAN module test harness, etc etc.

This isn't specifically a Bio:: issue, though if anyone has
suggestions please email.  I could try msys and see if it handles the
named-pipe-special-file better, if msys has an msys-perl distribution.

-- 
## Jonathan Cline
## jcline at ieee.org
## Mobile: +1-805-617-0223
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