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 \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