NOTES ON BUILDING TLPERL 2018

BUILD PLATFORM

64-bits Windows 10 FCU running under VirtualBox on
Linux.

GETTING THE PERL SOURCE

I downloaded the latest stable Perl source 5.26.1 from CPAN.

THE COMPILER

The file README.win32 in the root of the distribution contains
compilation instructions, which lists various supported MinGW
distributions.

I went with MSYS2 from https://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/,
which is a minimal Cygwin-like environment to run autotools, which I
expect to need at a later date. It includes the package manager
Pacman from Arch Linux, with which I first updated everything and
then installed mingw-w64-i686-gcc and mingw-w64-i686-dmake.  The web
page
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30069830/how-to-install-mingw-w64-and-msys2
made the process much clearer.

The compiler can be used outside the MSYS2 environment simply by prepending
<msys2 root>/mingw32/bin to the searchpath before use.

BUILDING PERL

I went to the win32 subdirectory of the Perl source. In makefile.mk
I adjusted relevant settings to my build environment. A diff for
this makefile.mk is included.

I compiled with

  dmake
  dmake test (Result: PASS)

I installed with

  dmake installbare

`installbare' omits the generation of html.

MAKING PERL PORTABLE

There were hard-coded paths in lib/Config.pm and
lib/Config_heavy.pl, which might cause problems.

I edited lib/Config.pm and lib/Config_heavy.pl to compute Perl's
location dynamically. To both I add the code

  my $rootdir = __FILE__;
  $rootdir =~ s![\\/][^\\/]*[\\/][^\\/]*$!!;
  $rootdir =~ s!/!\\!g;

and used this in Config.pm for the definition of %Config, taking
care to replace single-quoted strings with double-quoted ones and
escaping backslashes and other characters where necessary. I also
parameterized the location of the mingw compiler.

Config_heavy.pl got a similar treatment, in particular the
single-quoted here-documents with markers !END! (very long) and
EOVIRTUAL.

The original versions are still present in the lib directory under
the names Config.pm.orig and Config_heavy.pl.orig.

INSTALLING MODULES

When adding modules, I added the new Perl bin directory to the
searchpath. I downloaded needed modules from CPAN and added them
with

  perl Makefile.PL && dmake && dmake test && dmake install

All modules for which tests were defined got a pass, except for Tk,
where dmake test would not even run. They are, in order of
processing:

Math::Int64 0.54
IO::String 1.08
Digest::SHA1 2.13
File::Which 1.22
Encode::compat 0.07
Encode::Locale 1.05

Windows-specific:

Win32::API 0.84
Win32::WinError 0.04 (just copying WinError.pm to site/lib/Win32)

Win32API::Registry 0.33
Win32::Console 0.10 (no tests)
Win32::TieRegistry 0.30
Win32::Shortcut 0.08 (no tests)
Win32::OLE 0.1712 (added later). For errors, see below:
  Test Summary Report
  -------------------
  t/2_variant.t (Wstat: 0 Tests: 38 Failed: 1)
    Failed test:  27
  Files=7, Tests=40,  2 wallclock secs ( 0.16 usr +  0.08 sys =  0.23 CPU)
  Result: FAIL
  Failed 1/7 test programs. 1/40 subtests failed.
  dmake:  Error code 255, while making 'test_dynamic'
# skipped, probably not needed
 #Win32::Process 0.16

LWP and dependencies, in order of compilation/installation:

Socket 2.027
Date::Parse 2.30 (file TimeDate-2.30.tar.gz)
HTTP::Date 6.02
File::Listing 6.04
IO::HTML 1.001
LWP::MediaTypes 6.02
Test::Needs 0.002005
URI 1.73
Try::Tiny 0.30
HTTP::Message 6.14
HTML::Tagset 3.20
HTML::Parser 3.72
WWW::RobotRules 6.02
HTTP::Negotiate 6.01
Net::HTTP 6.17
Mozilla::CA 20160104
HTTP::Daemon 6.01
HTTP::Cookies 6.04
Test::Fatal 0.014
Test::RequiresInternet 0.05
LWP 6.31 (file libwww-perl-6.31.tar.gz)

Perl/Tk:

Tk 804.034

Based on prior experience:

1. Before running 'perl Makefile.PL', I commented out the LIBRARY
   line at the start of in Tk-804.033/PNG/zlib/win32/zlib.def.

2. Before running dmake, I added an entry '-limm32' at the end of
   the LDLOADLIBS line in the generated Makefile in the Tk source
   root directory.

dmake itself succeeded, running dmake test failed due to problems
with the makefile. I installed the module anyway.

Tk-DirSelect 1.12

JSON support

Cpanel::JSON::XS 4.01
JSON::MaybeXS 1.003010

MODIFICATIONS FOR TEXLIVE

- As explained above: our versions of lib/Config.pm and lib/Config_heavy.pl
  compute the location of tlperl dynamically. These files still
  contain a hard-coded path for mingw.
- The lib/pods directory has been removed, to save some space.
- The bin subdirectory now only contains exe- and dll files;
  batch files and Perl scripts have been removed.
- Copied from mingw32/bin to tlperl/bin:
  libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll, libstdc++-6.dll and libwinpthread-1.dll

TESTING WITH TEXLIVE

For testing the new Perl with the installer, I unpacked the net
installer and replaced its tlperl with the new one.

For testing the new Perl with tlmgr-gui.exe from the installed TeX
Live, I copied it into the fresh installation.

Both tests were done with 32-bits Windows 7 Home Premium as regular
user and 64-bits Windows 7 Professional as admin user.

tlmgr-gui appeared to work as intended.  I also successfully ran the
uninstaller.

Siep Kroonenberg

Last revision: February 2018