NOTES ON BUILDING TLPERL 2021

BUILD PLATFORM

A 64-bits Windows 10 20H2 64-bit KVM/QEMU virtual machine under
ArchLinux.

GETTING THE PERL SOURCE

I downloaded the latest stable Perl source 5.34.0 from CPAN.

THE COMPILER

The file README.win32 in the root of the distribution contains
compilation instructions and lists various supported MinGW
distributions. I went with the 32-bits compiler from
http://strawberryperl.com/package/kmx/32_gcctoolchain/ version 8.3.0

BUILDING PERL

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

I prepended the mingw bin directory to the searchpath and compiled with

  gmake
  gmake test

There were no test failures.

Installation with:

  gmake 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 some
single-quoted here-documents, some of which were very long.

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 prepended the new Perl bin directory to the
searchpath. I downloaded needed modules from metacpan.org and added
them with

  perl Makefile.PL && gmake && gmake test && gmake install

All modules for which tests were defined got a pass. They are, in
order of processing:

Math::Int64 0.54 still meeded?
IO::String 1.08
File::Which 1.27
Digest::SHA 6.02
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)

LWP and dependencies, in order of compilation/installation:

Socket 2.032
Date::Parse 2.33 (file TimeDate-2.33.tar.gz)
HTTP::Date 6.05
File::Listing 6.14
IO::HTML 1.004
Try::Tiny 0.31
Test::Fatal 0.016
Test::Needs 0.002009
LWP::MediaTypes 6.04
URI 5.10
HTTP::Message 6.36
HTML::Tagset 3.20
HTML::Parser 3.76
WWW::RobotRules 6.02
HTTP::Negotiate 6.01
Net::HTTP 6.22
Mozilla::CA 20211001
HTTP::Daemon 6.14
HTTP::Cookies 6.10
Test::RequiresInternet 0.05
LWP 6.61 (file libwww-perl-6.61.tar.gz)

JSON support

Cpanel::JSON::XS 4.27
JSON::MaybeXS 1.004003

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 tlshell.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 11 Professional as admin user.

tlshell, with its tlmgr Perl backend, appeared to work as intended.
I also successfully ran the uninstaller.

Siep Kroonenberg

March 2022