NOTES ON BUILDING TLPERL 2024 Compiler choice This time around, I resorted to the Microsoft compiler, component 'Visual Studio Build Tools 2022', since the previously used Strawberry Perl mingw64-based compiler is rather out of date, and I had no luck with other mingw64/msys2-based compilers. License comment on the download page: Use of this tool requires a valid Visual Studio license, unless you are building open-source dependencies for your project. Since perl is an open source dependency for TL on windows, we should be covered. BUILD PLATFORM Windows 11 Pro, build 22631.3085 GETTING THE PERL SOURCE I downloaded the latest stable Perl source 5.38.2 from CPAN. The file README.win32 in the root of the distribution contains compilation instructions and lists various supported compilers. As stated above, I went with Microsoft's Visual Studio 2022. BUILDING PERL I went to the win32 subdirectory of the Perl source. In Makefile I adjusted relevant settings to my build environment. A diff for this Makefile is included. I did the compilation from a command prompt 'x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2022'. From the w32 sudirectory, I compiled with nmake nmake test There were no test failures. Installation with: nmake 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 did not parameterize the location of the Visual C compiler. Config_heavy.pl got a similar treatment, in particular some single-quoted here-documents, some of which were very long. I tested correctness of the modifications with comparing invocations of Config::config_sh() with the original and patched versions (script configtest.pl). The original versions are still present in the lib directory under the names Config.orig.pm and Config_heavy.orig.pl. INSTALLING MODULES When adding modules, I prepended the new Perl bin directory to the searchpath. I downloaded needed modules from metacpan.org and added them with perl Makefile.PL && nmake && nmake test && nmake install All modules for which tests were defined got a pass. They are (names and versions), mostly in order of processing: Math::Int64 0.57 IO::String 1.08 File::Which 1.27 Digest::SHA 6.04 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) Cpanel::JSON::XS 4.37 JSON::MaybeXS 1.004003 (not the latest version) LWP and dependencies, in order of compilation/installation: Socket 2.037 Date::Parse 2.33 (file TimeDate-2.33.tar.gz) HTTP::Date 6.06 File::Listing 6.16 IO::HTML 1.004 Try::Tiny 0.31 Test::Fatal 0.017 Test::Needs 0.002010 LWP::MediaTypes 6.04 Test::Warnings 0.033 URI 5.27 Test::Harness 3.48 (maybe not needed after all) HTTP::Message 6.36 (not the latest version) HTML::Tagset 3.20 HTML::Parser 3.81 WWW::RobotRules 6.02 HTTP::Negotiate 6.01 Net::HTTP 6.23 Mozilla::CA 20231213 HTTP::Daemon 6.16 ExtUtils-Config 0.008 ExtUtils-Helpers 0.026 ExtUtils-InstallPaths 0.012 Module::Build::Tiny 0.047 installed with perl Build.PL && Build && Build test && Build install HTTP::Cookies 6.11 Test::RequiresInternet 0.05 LWP 6.76 (file libwww-perl-6.76.tar.gz) 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 the compiler. The original versions have been renamed to Config.orig.pm and Config_heave.orig.pl. - The lib/pods directory has been removed, to save some space. - The bin subdirectory now only contains exe- and dll files; batch files, Perl scripts and .pdb files have been removed. - Copied from elsewhere: vcruntime140.dll and vcruntime140_1.dll (vc redistributables). Siep Kroonenberg March 2024