Hi portable apps community,
I was wondering why pidgin portable's Perl support is disabled by default (according to the Build-Information menu item) but yet contains a perl.dll file in the plugins folder. Is there a particular reason for that? 
I'm not sure if I'm the only one, but I would love to use my perl plugins in the portable version of pidgin as well 
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I know my local copy of Pidgin shows Perl as disabled in build information as well despite perl.dll being present. Maybe it's just no longer supported on Windows. I don't think it was ever particularly popular so perhaps supporting it became an issue. Not sure if it's still enabled on Linux or not in 2.7.7.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
When I had a local copy of pidgin I used 2.7.3 and coded some perl snippets that worked fine there. So I'm pretty sure the standard windows distribution of pidgin comes with perl support
I guess it has been disabled on purpose because perl plugins just don't seem very popular as you said. But still I (hopefully among others) would be very happy if that would be enabled in future releases of pidgin portable ^^
It's an issue with Pidgin itself. Pidgin 2.7.7 for Windows has it disabled. We don't rebuild Pidgin for Pidgin Portable, we just repackage it. So, we can't enable it. You'll have to ask the Pidgin devs themselves.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Alright, I wasn't aware of that, thanks for the hint
Case closed I suppose ^^
After I just installed ActivePerl 5.10.1.1008, pidgin now tells me that perl support is enabled (seems to be determined at runtime, not at build-time).
So I played around with that and copied the perl folder to pidgin portables "apps" folder and uninstalled my local perl installation. But now it says that perl support is disabled again. That's a shame
I thought that might have worked as it did for PChat portable...
Is there any chance, that this might be "fixed" any time soon? It would be an awesome christmas present to perl junkies who love pidgin portable
In that case it would seem to be a local Perl install that Pidgin's perl plugin is looking for. Is there an environment variable or similar that is set it is keyed on? The source may have to be analyzed. I don't have the time to do it myself but if someone can determine it I'd be willing to add it into a later release launcher to let Pidgin know where to look.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Apparently pidgin checks the registry key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Perl" and "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Perl" to see if and where perl is available (at least according to a developer from pidgins support channel).
I hope that info helps to remedy this issue in future releases
That helps and I can integrate that into the launcher, but it will only work on PCs where you are logged in with administrative rights.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I guess that will do for a start
Thanks in advance!
I'm posting to show my interest on this becoming a reality. ^_^
in_vino_veritas,_in_aqua_sanitas.