[Bioperl-l] Strawberry Perl Professional Alpha 1

[Adam Kennedy]

Greetings all

I'm happy to report the first alpha release of the new Strawberry Perl
Professional.

Where the current Strawberry Perl product concept was to support
experienced Perl people that are new to Windows, Strawberry Perl
Professional is intended as the matching opposite of this, to support
Windows people that are new to Perl.

The goal is to provide an easy entry to Perl, with entirely GUI tools,
no expectation that users should have to use the command line, and
with a high number of the most popular and important CPAN modules
pre-installed, so that newbies can get up and running on basic
learning tasks quickly, without having to immediately deal with the
CPAN.

Most notably for this list, it contains both the Padre Perl IDE, and a
default-options version of BioPerl in the default install, providing
both trivially easy access to BioPerl functionality, and something in
which to write the actual code that uses it.

Please note this is most definitely an alpha. The GUI CPAN client
currently crashes at startup, the new Perl Shell will crash if you
enter a command that is not a legal Perl statement, and we don't yet
have anything beyond a bare bones BioPerl install. The main elements
of the distribution, however, are fairly well battle tested and the
Perl install itself is completely sound.

I've included the full set of features below, and you should expect
further alpha releases will following over the next few months.

Best Regards

Adam Kennedy

"Strawberry Perl Professional" 5.10.1.1 Alpha 1

    * This is an ALPHA - There are known bugs, and one of the purposes
of releasing this is outside consultation.
      It's built on top of Strawberry Perl January 2010 (5.10.1.1)
    * Included are:
         1. All common graphical toolkits that I know about and can
get to build easily (Tk, Wx, and Win32::GUI at the moment. OpenGL will
be in the next version.)
         2. Graphical CPAN client (CPANPLUS::Shell::Wx) and POD viewer (Tk::Pod)
         3. The Padre perl IDE, and Perl::Tidy, Perl::Critic, and
Catalyst plugins for it.
         4. Moose and a number of MooseX modules.
         5. Catalyst::Runtime, Catalyst::Devel, and a number of
Catalyst/CatalystX modules, including the Catalyst::Manual.
         6. A console Perl-language shells (Perl::Shell) - Devel::REPL
may be in the next version. **
         7. Dist::Zilla, Devel::NYTProf, Perl::Critic, Perl::Tidy, BioPerl...
         8. ... and everything that's already in Strawberry Perl.
    * There is no release notes page for this build