[Bioperl-l] Recommendations for BioPerl-related packages to include in Strawberry Perl Professional

[Chris Fields]

On Feb 13, 2010, at 8:22 PM, Adam Kennedy wrote:

> Greetings BioPerl'ers
> 
> The Strawberry Perl team is beginning to put together our new (and
> still free) Strawberry Professional distribution.
> 
> Unlike the core product (which has a mandate to be like the Unix Perl,
> and provide the means to install as much of CPAN as possible) the new
> distribution has the goal of pre-installing as many useful, important,
> or essential modules in advance as possible. The aim is to get users
> up and running with simple common tasks quickly, delaying the need to
> navigate the CPAN and the module installation process until after they
> are convinced they can create useful programs.
> 
> As part of this, we plan to include BioPerl and a Perl IDE in the
> default installation, so that BioPeople on Windows can just install a
> single program and then be up and running fast. At the moment,
> Strawberry supports the installation of the BioPerl package with the
> default options (a number of options that add more pieces still fail
> at the present time).

I suppose the Perl IDE would be Padre? ;> 

> My question to this list is, what are the packages that are not in the
> default option install of BioPerl that you feel are the most
> important, and the most often needed.

In order:

1) BioPerl-Run is a good runner up.  
2) BioPerl-Network is easy as well (pure perl).  
3) BioPerl-DB, but it requires a DBI adaptor for mysql, Pg, Oracle.  

These should all install on Windows (have tested with ActiveState before).  I has actually pushed alpha releases out for the above three to CPAN, this following the core 1.6.1 release, but never got around to pushing out newer alphas.  I could possibly rectify that this coming week, with the final release soon after.  The previous releases already in CPAN might also suffice.

> And are there any complementary packages you would like us to include
> to make life easier for newbie Windows BioPeople?

Related to BioPerl:

Bio::Graphics.  Very important module!

> Best Regards
> 
> Adam K

No prob.  

chris