Mingw and perl.

[TLOlczyk]

I find that sometimes perl modules that include C code have problems
with the Activestate distro ( which uses MSVC ). I don't particularly
like cygwin because there are times when the cygwin dll can act
flakey. I've looked around for instructions on building perl within
Mingw, but am finding the information confusing. Can anyone explain/
recommend some web pages on using Mingw for perl?


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[Sisyphus]

I find that sometimes perl modules that include C code have problems
with the Activestate distro ( which uses MSVC ). I don't particularly
like cygwin because there are times when the cygwin dll can act
flakey.

Generally, if the C code doesn't compile on MSVC-built perl, it also
doesn't compile on MinGW-built perl either. The problem is often with
the OS rather than the compiler - in which case cygwin may turn out to
to be the only solution.

I've looked around for instructions on building perl within
Mingw, but am finding the information confusing. Can anyone explain/
recommend some web pages on using Mingw for perl?

When I build with MinGW I start with the source available from ActiveState:
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/ActivePerl/Source

Alternatively you could use the source available from cpan.

The top-level source directory contains a file called 'README.win32'
which contains the information you need.

Unfortunately, with their latest release (build 810), ActiveState have
altered 'makefile.mk' so that it works with dmake and MSVC instead of
dmake and MinGW. (I don't know whether the same changes have been made
to the makefile.mk that ships with cpan source.) So I used the
makefile.mk that I had used with build 809.

That seemed to work fairly well - test25 in ext/threads/t/thread.t
failed - I don't know why - haven't looked, haven't worried, though I
probably should. (I also always get some failures in io/fs.t and
op/stat.t which I assume is because I'm building on a FAT rather than
NTFS file system.)

I'll email you the actual makefile.mk I ran to build my 810 (perl 5.8.4).

Hth.

Cheers,
Rob