A Random Walk

Today I wandered around Perl6 stuff just a little bit. Here's some things that I ran into:

use.perl

First stop, masak's journal entry at use.perl. He's building a persistence layer for Web.pm that mimic's Ruby's ActiveRecord in a very simple way. Quite cool.

Drawing Blanks

Recently Rakudo Perl was changed so that make install could work. Actually, it was changed so that, in order to run the perl6 binary anywhere other than the build directory, you must run make install. Anyway, someone updated the page describing how to get Rakudo to include the make install instructions. Only they actually typed $make install where all of the other command-line-like lines have a space after the dollar sign and before the command. For some reason that little inconsistency was bugging me, so I thought, "I've got a login and edit rights, I'll just go change it!" The only problem is that when I tried to login, it took me to a blank page. Then, I was poking around on rakudo.org and there were several prominent pages that all ended up blank on my browser. Bummer. I left a note to alester with a bot on IRC in hopes that he'd know what to do.

Turtles all the way down

On a lark, I tried to install Rakudo on cygwin. However, the only Windows box I have handy is actually a VirtualBox instance. So, I tried installing Rakudo on a unix environment running on a virtual Windows environment running on a unix OS. In the process I realized just how much of Parrot's build process is dependant on Perl. It got a long way before it complained about not being able to find a compiler.

Unfortunately, it didn't work. After installing parrot, it died tried to execute parrot_install/bin/parrot_config. In fact, it seemed to die executing any of the parrot binaries from within the parrot_install/bin directory. In fact, it seemed that the only time executing one of the parrot binaries worked was when they were run from the parrot build directory.

The End

And here's where it ended because I was too tired to do anything else.