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ActiveState Code FAQ

General

  • What is ActiveState Code?

    ActiveState Code (together with the ActiveState Community site) is ActiveState's developer community and resource site. Here we want to provide free services (such as the Code Recipes and Mailing List Archives) for the dynamic languages communities and provide a place for ActiveState internal developers and external users to share code and ideas. See the About page for more details.

  • Where is my account's avatar image coming from?

    We fetch user avatars from Gravatar, an open service (not associated with ActiveState) that allows anyone to associate an image with their email address. If you would like to change the image used, you will need to visit the Gravatar management page.

ActiveState Code Recipes

ActiveState PPM Index

  • What is PPM?

    PPM is the package management utility for ActivePerl. It simplifies the task of locating, installing, upgrading and removing Perl modules. The PPPM client accesses PPM repositories (collections of packages) on the internet or on a local network.

    PPM repositories hosted at ActiveState are updated with packages from CPAN every day. Builds are available for seven platforms: Windows 32-bit and 64-bit; Mac OS X; Linux 32-bit and 64-bit; Solaris SPARC 32-bit and 64-bit.

  • How do I add my package to PPM?

    1. Upload your package to CPAN.
    2. Wait for a couple of days and search for your package in our PPM Index.
    3. Check the RSS feed for all build of the module to check for failed builds.

  • Why are some builds missing in PPM?

    Builds for a package could be missing for various reasons:

    1. If you see the failed icon (FAILED), it means that the build failed on that particular platform. You can click on this icon and visit the build log to diagnose what went wrong.

    2. If you see the missing icon (MISSING), it means that the package has not yet been built and tested by the PPM build server for this particular platform.

    3. If you see "n/a" it means there is no PPM repository for this platform. Currently there are no 64-bit repositories for Perl 5.8, and no 32-bit repository for Perl 5.12 on Solaris.

  • How is popularity of PPM Packages determined?

    The packages are ranked based on number of downloads for the last month from the ActivePerl PPM client program; either by initial install of the package or by upgrading the package.

    If an upwards arrow (⬆) is showing together with the download number, then download numbers for the package are trending up. If a downwards arrow (⬇) is showing then the download numbers are trending down. These markers show if download numbers for the last week deviates with more than 10% from the average over the last month.

ActiveState PyPM Index

  • What is PyPM?

    PyPM is the package management utility for ActivePython. It simplifies the task of locating, installing, upgrading and removing Python modules. The PyPM client accesses PyPM repositories (collections of packages) on the internet or on a local network.

    PyPM repositories hosted at ActiveState are updated with packages from PyPI every day. Builds are available for five platforms: Windows 32-bit and 64-bit; Mac OS X; Linux 32-bit and 64-bit.

  • pip and easy_install are mostly source-based installers (similar to Gentoo Portage and Arch's Packman, while PyPM is a binary-based installer (similar to RPM and apt-get). We recommend ActivePython users to install packages using PyPM, and only if that fails (usually it doesn't), attempt the same using pip/easy_install. PyPM supports a very similar command interface and features to pip, examples: install, uninstall and requirements (install -r requirements.txt and freeze).

  • How do I add my package to PyPM?

    1. Write a setup.py for your package (see The Hitchhiker's Guide to Packaging)
    2. Register and upload (or link to) your package in PyPI (see the same guide as above)
    3. Wait for a couple of days and search for your package in our PyPM Index.

  • Why are some builds missing in PyPM?

    Builds for a package could be missing for various reasons:

    1. If you see the failed icon (FAILED), it means that the build failed on that particular platform. You can click on this icon and visit the build log to diagnose what went wrong.

    2. If you see the missing icon (MISSING), it means one of the following:

      • There wasn't even an attempt to build the package due to a missing/failing dependent package. You can visit the dependencies (linked in the right sidebar) to assess which of them is missing/failing. In future, we intend to make this diagnostic process automatic. This is the most common reason for a missing build.

      • If the build is for Python 3, then the package may not support Python 3 yet. If a package can run on Python 3, it must use the PyPI classifier Programming Language :: Python :: 3.

      • The package is not yet publicly available; as in, perhaps, it is still being internally tested at ActiveState.

    3. A package may not have any release information at all, in which case no build will be attempted for any platform. This often happens due to one of the two reasons:

      • The package author either did not upload the source distribution to PyPI or link to it properly

      • The uploaded or linked source distribution does not have a proper metadata (eg: invalid encoding of PKG-INFO; invalid package name in install_requires).

Is a question of yours not answered? Please, ask a question. :)