Strawberry Perl: Achieving Win32 Platform Equality

Over two years in the making, and involving dozens of patches to the Perl Core and the CPAN toolchain, Strawberry Perl has reached the first production release.

This is an introductory talk on Strawberry Perl by the current Strawberry Pumpking, Adam Kennedy.

Starting from very beginning, the talk ranges over issues like:

• Why it finally became possible to create a fully open source Win32 Perl distribution.
• The trials and tribulations of forming a development team and a community.
• The politics and drama of bullying the Perl 5 Porters and CPAN Illuminati into making changes.
• How we balanced the (endless) demands of Win32 Perl users with the limited time of developers to achieve a stable and reliable product.

The talk also provides a brief overview of the Perl::Dist toolkit that was used to build Strawberry Perl, and how to use it to create customized Perl distributions.

Finally, the talk will cover the future priorities of the project and the new advances being added to meet the needs of the highly varied userbase.