[Bioperl-l] Testing Needed: Strawberry Perl October 2009 to provide support for BioPerl

[Adam Kennedy]

Dear BioPeople

Since we added a "Live Support Chat" link to the frontpage of the
Strawberry Perl website ( http://strawberryperl.com/ ) we've noticed
that one of the main types of visitors that we see in the IRC channel
( #win32 on irc.perl.org ) is biologists trying to install various
things.

As a result, for the October 2009 release of Strawberry Perl, we've
prioritised adding support for CPAN-installation of BioPerl.

Changes include a major improvement to crypto support which provides
OpenSSL and support for https:// URL, we now ship Postgres and MySQL
DBI drivers in the default installation, and we have added Berkely DB
support as well.

I'm happy to report that we now believe we are in a position to
officially support the installation of BioPerl.

Running "install BioPerl" from the CPAN client should now work
correctly, for the default set of options, and BioPerl-dependant
packages on the CPAN should recursively install correctly.

Prior to the official release next week, we would appreciate testing
from the BioPerl community.

Release candidate installers for the October release are available at
the following URLs

http://strawberryperl.com/download/strawberryperl-5.10.1.0.msi

http://strawberryperl.com/download/strawberryperl-5.8.9.3.msi

Once installed, run Start -> Program Files -> Strawberry Perl -> CPAN Client

>From the CPAN client command line, run "install BioPerl" and select
the default options.

Once installed, you should be able to do anything you do normally with
a BioPerl install.

Assuming all goes well in this release, for the next release January
2010 we plan to also produce a "Strawberry Perl Professional"
distribution that will bundle BioPerl as part of the default
installation, as well as a Perl IDE and other useful packages.

Success or failure of the release candidate can be reported either
here or to #win32 on irc.perl.org.

Adam K