NOTES ON BUILDING TLPERL 2012 BUILD PLATFORM 32-bits Windows XP Professional SP3 running under VirtualBox on Linux. The user is not an administrator. GETTING THE PERL SOURCE I downloaded from CPAN: the latest stable Perl source 5.14.2 COLLECTING A NATIVE BUILD ENVIRONMENT I found in the root of the distribution a file README.win32 containing compilation instructions, which listed both mingw32 from mingw.org and the newer mingw64 from mingw-w64.sf.net as possible compilers. I downloaded and ran the automated downloader/installer x86-mingw32-build-1.0-sh.tar.bz2. I selected gcc and g++. I added the mingw32 bin subdirectory to the searchpath. Based on the same README.win32 from the Perl source, I downloaded dmake-4.12-2009-SHAY.zip from http://search.cpan.org/dist/dmake. Following the file readme.txt in the root of this archive, I added the file dmake.exe and the startup subdirectory to the bin subdirectory of mingw. BUILDING I went to the win32 subdirectory of the Perl source. In makefile.mk I adjusted relevant settings to my build environment. Then I typed dmake and dmake install 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 single-quoted here-documents with markers !END! (very long) and EOVIRTUAL I replaced the hard-coded Perl paths. Because the $rootdir variable needed to be interpolated, I shifted from single- to double-quoting, which required escaping various characters. The original versions are still present under the names Config.pm.orig and Config_heavy.pl.orig. Diffs are here. For adding modules, I added the new Perl bin directory to the searchpath. I downloaded them all from CPAN. Windows-specific: Win32-API-0.68.tar.gz Win32-Shortcut-0.07.tar.gz Win32API-Registry-0.32.tar.gz Win32-TieRegistry-0.26.tar.gz Win32-Process-Info-1.019.tar.gz Perl/Tk: Tk-804.030.tar.gz LWP and dependencies, in order of compilation/installation: HTML-Tagset-3.20.tar.gz HTML-Parser-3.69.tar.gz URI-1.60.tar.gz Encode-Locale-1.03.tar.gz HTTP-Date-6.02.tar.gz File-Listing-6.04.tar.gz LWP-MediaTypes-6.02.tar.gz HTTP-Message-6.03.tar.gz HTTP-Cookies-6.01.tar.gz HTTP-Daemon-6.01.tar.gz HTTP-Negotiate-6.01.tar.gz Net-HTTP-6.03.tar.gz WWW-RobotRules-6.02.tar.gz libwww-perl-6.04.tar.gz Other: IO-String-1.08.tar.gz Digest-SHA1-2.13.tar.gz (for 3rd-party scripts) They were all configured, compiled and installed with perl Makefile.PL dmake dmake install Compared to 2011, two modules have been dropped because of additional dependencies: Carp-Always-0.11 (for backtracing) File-Which-1.09 (for a 3rd-party script) MODIFICATIONS FOR TEXLIVE - lib/Config.pm and lib/Config_heavy.pl now compute the location of tlperl dynamically; see above. - The html directory has been removed. - The site/lib subdirectory is folded into lib. - 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_dw2_1.dll and libstdc++-6.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 the installed TeX Live, I copied it into the fresh installation. tlmgr appeared to work as intended. I also successfully ran the uninstaller. Siep Kroonenberg Last revision: May 21 2012