NOTES ON BUILDING TLPERL 2019

BUILD PLATFORM

64-bits Windows 7 running under VirtualBox on Linux.

GETTING THE PERL SOURCE

I downloaded the latest stable Perl source 5.28.1 from CPAN.

THE COMPILER

The file README.win32 in the root of the distribution contains
compilation instructions, which lists various supported MinGW
distributions. I went with the 32-bits compiler from
www.mingw-w64.org, version 6.0.0, containing gcc version 8.1.0.

BUILDING PERL

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

I compiled with

  dmake
  dmake test

There were some test failures:

Test Summary Report
-------------------
../dist/IO/t/io_leak.t                       (Wstat: 65280 Tests: 0 Failed: 0)
  Non-zero exit status: 255
  Parse errors: No plan found in TAP output
../dist/IO/t/io_poll.t                       (Wstat: 65280 Tests: 0 Failed: 0)
  Non-zero exit status: 255
  Parse errors: No plan found in TAP output
../ext/IPC-Open3/t/IPC-Open3.t               (Wstat: 0 Tests: 45 Failed: 0)
  TODO passed:   25
Files=2666, Tests=1083818, 2126 wallclock secs (95.45 usr +  4.91 sys = 100.36 CPU)
Result: FAIL
dmake:  Error code 130, while making 'test'

but I hope that these will not impact us.

Installation with:

  dmake 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 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.

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

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

Math::Int64 0.54
IO::String 1.08
File::Which 1.23
Digest::SHA1 2.13 526 => 528
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)
Win32::OLE 0.1712

LWP and dependencies, in order of compilation/installation:

Socket 2.029
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
Test::Needs 0.002005
URI 1.76
Try::Tiny 0.30
HTTP::Message 6.18
HTML::Tagset 3.20
HTML::Parser 3.72
WWW::RobotRules 6.02
HTTP::Negotiate 6.01
Net::HTTP 6.18
Mozilla::CA 20180117
HTTP::Daemon 6.01
HTTP::Cookies 6.04
Test::Fatal 0.014
Test::RequiresInternet 0.05
LWP 6.37 (file libwww-perl-6.37.tar.gz)

JSON support

Cpanel::JSON::XS 4.09
JSON::MaybeXS 1.004000

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 10 Professional as admin user.

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

Siep Kroonenberg

Last revision: March 2019