Do you want to get started with Perl v5.36?
Honestly speaking I never bothered about any of the Perl releases before. But Perl v5.36 is very special and close to me.
Why?
Recently I have been sharing new features introduced in Perl dating back to v5.10, inspired by the book Perl new features v5.10 to v5.34 by brain d foy.
I received a FREE copy of the book, a big thank you to brian d foy.
I have a Windows box running WSL (Ubuntu 20.04). Earlier, I was using Virtual Machine but then latest Windows update stopped the support. I had no choice but to switch over. I was reluctant initially but I am happy now.
Going back to the topic about Perl v5.36.
I have been using Perl for little over 2 decades now. And in all these days, I never dared compile Perl binary from source. I know some of my friends do this for fun and they are really hardcore guys. I always wonder how it feels to get everything done from scratch.
As I was playing with the Perl features, I found myself limited to my system Perl, which is v5.30. That means there is no way I can’t try new features from the book beyond v5.30.
Is it time get new Perl binary installed?
Even today, I don’t feel comfortable doing it. I was looking for an alternative. I ended up using Perlbrew. I followed the instructions in the blog post by Andrew Solomon.
In no time, I had Perl v5.32, Perl v5.34 and Perl v5.35. I begin my journey and documented by experience in the dedicated GitHub repository as suggested by Dave Cross.
But the real fun begin only when we had Perl v5.36 released.
So can I use Perlbrew to install the lastest Perl v5.36?
Unfortunately not, out of the box.
So I started exploring ways to get Perl v5.36 installed using Perlbrew and I ended up doing this in the order.
Step 1: Download the tar ball
$ wget https://cpan.metacpan.org/authors/id/R/RJ/RJBS/perl-5.36.0.tar.gz
Step 2: Copy the tar ball to correct folder
$ cp ~/perl-5.36.0.tar.gz ~/perl5/perlbrew/dists/
Step 3: Install Perl v5.36 now
$ perlbrew install perl-5.36.0
It didn’t go as per the plan and failed with test failures
Step 4: Retried with –force
$ perlbrew --force install perl-5.36.0
Even this failed miserably with test failures.
Step 5: One last attemp, like below:
$ perlbrew --notest install perl-5.36.0
Got lucky third time, finally.
Step 6: Create an alias p536
$ alias p536='~/perl5/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.36.0/bin/perl'
Step 7: Test the install
$ perl536 -V:version
version='5.36.0';
Now I have all the power in the world. I did it, after all the obstacles.
Time to explore all the new features of Perl v5.36. I continued doing daily post of Perl features mostly focussing now on Perl v5.36.
You can checkout all I have covered so far here.