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in reply to Re: Can't run nmake
in thread Can't run nmake

I don't know about the anti-MS motivation.

When MS changed from 16-Bit DOS to 32-Bit Windows [95] the then current nmake 1.4 (included in MSVC 1.5) exposed a massive bug in the new 32-Bit environment.

As a consequence MS published a bugfix (KB132084) which offered the fix (nmake 1.5) as a freely available download for that program, which was otherwise only available as part of the commercial MSVC.

Also in later years nmake was only available as part of the payware compiler. When did MS start to give compilers away for free (aka Express editions ?)

So at the time of nmake 1.5 the (KB) knowledgebase page of MS with its few KB(kilobytes) download of a free nmake was a godsend for the Perl people, who wanted to ease the life of Windows users.

Update: make explicit KB = (ms) knowledge base and KB = K byte

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Re^3: Can't run nmake
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Jul 17, 2010 at 23:02 UTC
    When did MS start to give compilers away for free (aka Express editions ?)

    I don't have exact time-lines, nor can I think of any easy way of obtaining them, but I think that you're asking the wrong question. The question should be: "When was the horribly broken, automated download of nmake15 added to cpan.pm?"

    On the basis of my memory only, but I am very confident that I had been using one of the MS free compilers for building XS extensions for a year or two before I installed a new version of (AS) Perl that suddenly decided to pull and use nmake15 each time I tried to use the CPAN shell. Despite that I had a fully working setup on my system, and nmake.exe was availble via my path; just because it "couldn't find it" by looking in an arbitrary list o wrong places.

    My from-memory guess is that this happened around 5.8.6 or later.


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