Charles Engelke's Blog

In an earlier
post, I talked about Microsoft’s
free
Visual C++ Toolkit. I built Perl
for Windows with it successfully,
but it took me about half a dozen tries. On a Unix machine the
build process is very sophisticated. You run a Configure program,
which figures out everything the build process needs to know about
your environment, then you use make to perform the
actual build. But Configure is a Unix shell script, and you can’t
run it under Windows.

The Perl team has done 99% of what Configure would otherwise do for
us Windows users, providing us a Makefile that’s almost ready to
use. You need to edit a few things in the Makefile, which isn’t
too tough. You also have to have your development tools set up
properly, and avoid a few Windows “gotchas”. Here’s what I did that
finally worked (after about five tries).

1. Unpack the stable tarball with WinZip or Cygwin’s tar. (The tar command
   is tar xzvf stable.tar.gz.) Change to the
   win32 folder in the unpacked directory tree. Warning:
   unpack this in a folder with no spaces in its name! Otherwise,
   most of the build works, but the test fails. Apparently, something
   in the build files doesn’t expect spaces in file paths.
2. Edit the Makefile, performing the following changes:
   • Change INST_TOP = $(INST_DRV)\perl to
     indicate where you want Perl to end up. Since I was just
     experimenting, I changed it to INST_TOP = c:\myperl.
   • Comment out the line CCTYPE = MSVC60 by
     putting a # at the front (or just delete it). The free
     toolkit is different enough that we don’t want the build
     process to perform any special steps for Visual C++ 6.0.
   • Replace CCHOME = $(MSVCDIR) with the location
     of your C++ Toolkit. For the default installation, that
     gives CCHOME = C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual C++
     Toolkit 2003.
   • There are a couple of lines that set compiler flags. They
     each contain -nologo -Gf -W3. Change the
     -Gf to -GF, to keep the
     compiler from warning you that the option is deprecated
     and will stop working in some future version.
   • There’s a line containing perlglob$(o) setargv$(o).
     Delete setargv$(o). I don’t know why; I
     saw this as a hint, and it fixed an error I was getting, and
     my build still passed all tests.
3. In the win32 folder of the unpacked distribution,
   type the command nmake. After that’s done, without
   errors (it worked for me), type nmake test. If
   that goes okay, type nmake install.

That’s it! You’ve built Perl from source (and now you can install
even binary modules from CPAN).