ActiveState Perl 5.6 vs 5.8

[kchung]

In the SCRATCH_INSTALL directions, it directs people to look into ActiveState's ActivePERL 5.6. Is there anything wrong with installing 5.8 instead?

[mflorell]

Nope. We've used both with no problems. I have not used the more recent 5.8 releases, but last year when I last tested them they worked fine.

If you use Activestate Perl you will have to reinstall all cpan modules.

[kchung]

Thanks for your answer.

Has anyone got anytime to ammend the scratch_install instructions on how to use activeperl? Is there anything I should watch out for?

[jlodvo]

that would be great to have a Activestate Perl scratch_install instructions

[mflorell]

this is the short version:
- download the latest 5.8 tar.gz version of ActivePerl from ActiveState.com
- unzip and untar then cd to directory
- ./configure; make; make install
- make a symbolic link from ./bin/perl to /usr/bin/perl
- reinstall all cpan modules

There may be some inaccuracies in that but that's basically the concept.

I have not tested recently because the latest source perl 5.8 fixes issues that I used to have with perl 5.6. Not sure if there is a performance gain anymore for using ActivePerl over straight perl source.

[kchung]

do you happen to know if there's a perl benchmarking script like mysql has?

[mflorell]

This would be rather difficult to do for the VICIDIAL scripts since most of them can only be tested on active systems with Asterisk running.

If anyone has time to do benchmarks it would be nice to know how the current 5.8 perl code compares to the ActivePerl code.