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in reply to Problems obtaining nmake

I thought this was a April Fool's posting, until I actually went to node 128077 (A Guide to Installing Modules). It does indeed specifically recommend getting nmake, particularly. Which seems bizarre to me. The normal recommendation I've seen is that if the only make you have is nmake, the first thing you do is get a better make.

Allow me to second the recommendation of using Strawberry Perl, which ships with a mostly-working CPAN.pm. If that isn't good enough, there's always cygwin. Or, if you have the misfortune to be on Ten, you also have WSL as a consolation prize.

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Re^2: Problems obtaining nmake
by Corion (Patriarch) on Apr 09, 2018 at 10:47 UTC
    Which seems bizarre to me. The normal recommendation I've seen is that if the only make you have is nmake, the first thing you do is get a better make.

    While that may or may not be your personal conviction, this is not good advice to use when trying to find the appropriate make tool to use with your Perl tool chain.

    For Perl, you use whatever make tool is listed by:

    perl -V:make

    On Strawberry Perl, this is dmake, and dmake happens to be shipped with Strawberry Perl already.

    On (older versions of) ActiveState Perl and many things using the MSVC tool chain, this outputs nmake and it behooves you to use nmake as your build tool then, because all the tools within the Perl ecosystem that care about $Config{make} will output Makefiles compatible with the nmake slang of make then.