How to deal with build problems of ActiveState for its ppm?

Question

I use community version of ActiveState Perl under Windows and therefore need to either keep older versions around or use the most current releases. Problem is that I often found that some of my used packages do not build on their current Perl distributions, some of those build problems get fixed "sometime". Currently SOAP::Lite is marked as to not build successfully, looks like because of some missing dependencies , though the tests of SOAP::Lite itself seems to pass. Only waiting until this gets fixed doesn't seem like a good solution to me, so I wonder:

Is there any known best practice how to deal with such build problems regarding ActiveState? Is there any bug tracker or else to get them having a look at those problems? Would there be any chance to provide patches, if one would have a solutions for some problems? Or would one need to always contact the project for the package not building? Because some problems are clearly related to ActiveStates environment.

I couldn't find anything to contact Activestate or whatever regarding such build problems. Seems to me the only possible way is to buy support.

Answer 1

In this case, Crypt::SSLeay fails to build because it cannot deduce where ActiveState keeps OpenSSL when building PPM modules. I do not know why SOAP::Lite declares a dependency on Crypt::SSLeay , but, unfortunately it does.

So, the package manager fails to package the module.

Since it doesn't look like there are any problems building SOAP::Lite itself, do download the package, extract, and do the

C:\...> perl Makefile.PL
C:\...> dmake
C:\...> dmake test

and finally, if tests pass,

dmake install

dance.

The module's Makefile.PL is interesting because it declares explicit dependencies on both IO::Socket::SSL and Crypt::SSLeay when all it needs is to recommend a dependency on LWP::Protocol::https .

I should point out that IO::Socket::SSL is what you want .