NOTES ON BUILDING TLPERL 2016

BUILD PLATFORM

32-bits Windows 7 SP1 running under VirtualBox on
Linux.

GETTING THE PERL SOURCE

I downloaded the latest stable Perl source 5.22.1 from CPAN.

THE COMPILER

The file README.win32 in the root of the distribution contains
compilation instructions, which lists various supported MinGW
distributions, including a trimmed-down version of MinGW64 offered
by the Strawberry Perl project. I downloaded
mingw64-w32-gcc4.9.2_20150513.zip and
32bit_dmake-4.12.2-bin_20140810.zip from
http://strawberryperl.com/package/kmx/32_gcctoolchain/ and
http://strawberryperl.com/package/kmx/32_tools/ respectively,
unzipped mingw and put dmake.exe and the dmake startup subdirectory
in the bin subdirectory of mingw.

This MinGW compiler does not require installation; it is sufficient
to prepend <root>\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. As in the
previous release, I turned off optimization in the hope to avoid
some intractable failures. A diff for makefile.mk is included.

I compiled with

  dmake && dmake test

There were no test errors. I installed with

  dmake installbare

`installbare' omits the generation of html.

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

They are, in order of processing:

Math::Int64 0.54
IO::String 1.08
Digest::SHA1 2.13
File::Which 1.21
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 (tests ok, for once)
Win32::Shortcut 0.08 (no tests)
Win32::OLE 0.1712

LWP and dependencies, in order of compilation/installation:

Socket 2.021
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
URI 1.71
HTTP::Message 6.11
HTML::Tagset 3.20
HTML::Parser 3.72
WWW::RobotRules 6.02
HTTP::Negotiate 6.01
Net::HTTP 6.09
Mozilla::CA 20160104
HTTP::Daemon 6.01
HTTP::Cookies 6.01
LWP 6.15 (file libwww-perl-6.15.tar.gz)

Perl/Tk:

Tk 804.033

This module did not compile rightaway:

1. In Tk-804.033/PNG/zlib/win32/zlib.def I had to comment out the
   LIBRARY line at the start.

2. An entry '-limm32' somehow did not make it into LDLOADLIBS in the
   generated Makefile in the Tk source root directory. After
   manually adding this at the end of the LDLOADLIBS definition,
   dmake did succeed.

Tk-DirSelect 1.12

And another Windows module, not previously included:

Win32-Process-0.16

MAKING PERL PORTABLE

There were hard-coded paths in lib/Config.pm and
lib/Config_heavy.pl, which were likely to 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.

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 mingw/bin to tlperl/bin:
  libgcc_s_sjlj_1.dll, libstdc++-6.dll and libwinpthread-1.dll

This time around, I kept the site directory tree separate.

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: April 2016