[Bioperl-l] Strawberry Perl October 2009 released, with BioPerl as headline feature

[Adam Kennedy]

Dear BioPeople

I'm happy to announce to the final release of Strawberry Perl October 2009.

It can be downloaded at http://strawberryperl.com/

The three headline improvements for this release are:

- Inclusion of the DBD::Pg PostgreSQL client in the default install
- Inclusion of libdb.dll and a working DB_File in the default install,
allowing installation of BioPerl from the CPAN.
- Inclusion of OpenSSL and a number of other crypto packages, allowing
support for HTTPS and signed CPAN modules.

The installation of BioPerl 1.6.1 with default Makefile.PL options
(i.e. just hitting enter for everything) should now work relatively
reliably, albeit with some fairly noisy warnings during testing.

Anyone having installation difficulties can click on the "Live Chat"
support link at the top of the Strawberry Perl front page or join
#win32 on irc.perl.org, and we'll do our best to help you out. Please
note the channel is staffed by volunteers in an imperfect mix of
timezones, if you do not get an immediate response to your question
please lurk in the channel and you'll get an answer when someone wakes
up.

Over the few releases, our intention is to become and default and
obvious choice for running BioPerl applications on Windows (and to
improve BioPerl windows support generally).

To help achieve this, we have formed a partnership with Microsoft to
help with Windows testing. Strawberry Perl is the founding member of
Microsoft's Open Source Network, which provides us access to a wide
variety of different Windows virtual machine environments, hosted,
managed and paid for by Microsoft.

These Windows virtual machines (covering XP, Vista, Server 2003 32bit,
Server 2003 64bit, Server 2008 32bit, Server 2008 64bit, and shortly
Windows 7) are completely free to access and use for testing and
debugging, and are available for use by anyone with a register CPAN
login.

Login accounts and coordination of access to the VMs are managed in
irc.perl.org #msopensource. Please contact someone there for access to
the environments.

In addition to this, for the January 2010 release of the new
Strawberry Perl Professional distribution we intend to include BioPerl
in the default install, along with the Padre Perl IDE and many other
distributions such as SDL for mathematical programming, Imager and GD
for graphics, and many other popular CPAN modules.

Suggestions for CPAN modules that the BioPerl community would like to
see included on top of the core BioPerl package are welcome. Bug
reports can be filed against the Perl-Dist- Strawberry package on
rt.cpan.org.

Thank you all for your time, and look forward to working with you guys
to make the installation of BioPerl better, easier, and more reliable.

Adam Kennedy
Strawberry Perl Team