jeffa wrote in followup 719796:

I'm sorry dude, it's just that every single time i read what you are working on I cannot figure out why you consistently try to drink water with a fork when their are perfectly good cups out there. I guess part of being intrepid is not doing what every one else does -- because they do it with such ease and flair.

STRUGGLE!!!!!! STRUGGLE!!! ;)

LOL. Yeah! I don't have much difficulty seeing how my posts would prompt such a reaction ;-). It's pretty arcane stuff to begin with — like, why is this guy using MS Windows if he wants to do complex stuff with CPAN modules and all??. It is easy to think that I ought to just only do any of it on a free *nix platform where it is all so native and smooth. ;-)

I think you have it right: It's just part of what being Intrepid is about ;-).

Back a few years: I wasn't using Linux™ or anything like it, though, and in fact the Windows port of Perl (mostly by Gurusamy Sarathy) had just been "finished" and ActiveState was just a little startup... etc. My itch to see Perl on Windows work better goes back that long. It's a long-lived itch.

I talked with Tye McQueen on Perlmonks years ago about creating a binary distro of Perl for Windows using the Free GNU gcc tools from MinGW, long before Strawberry existed. I keep thinking about this stuff – experiencing this itch – and that makes me look with particular intensity at how the current efforts, like StrawberryPerl, work.

One thing that really itches for me in particular is that few people really understand how dmake works, but we still rely on it for building Perl on a Windows platform. I have an uncomfortable feeling any time a black box is involved in something I am particularly interested in. It's been a necessary evil(?) all this time but I wonder if it has to stay that way.