Testing Strawberry Perl on the same server as ActivePerl

Question

I'd like to try out Strawberry Perl 5.12 on a win2k3sp2 server that currently uses ActivePerl 5.10 and mod_perl2. I have a separate Apache service set up for development but remember seeing something about clearing all references in the Windows environment that point to anything besides Strawberry Perl. Is there any way around that? Am I going to destroy my ActivePerl system trying to test drive Strawberry? Has anybody migrated this way successfully?

Answer 1

Usually you would not have any problem. I had ActivePerl and Strawberry both available in PATH for some time. I copied Strawberry's perl.exe into file with other name and called it. But you will have problem with utilities like "cpan" or "ptar" in Perl that is farther in PATH, you will need to call them from their bin directory only.

P.S. All problems will not be permanent.

P.P.S. Make a backup of ActivePerl and you always will be able to restore it.