I don't understand that. Unless you tell it otherwise, cpan Module will use dmake and mingw for both. Additionally, ActivePerl provides other options, so it should make things easier, not harder.

That's how things are with Strawberry—just use CPAN and things Just Work. With ActiveState, unless they've changed things in the past two years, you need to have Visual C and nmake installed (which I don't), or anything XS-based fails miserably. AS does have ppm,but—at least the version I have (5.10)—it's horrible.

Sounds like you installed Wx::Alien, which builds the wxWidgets library for Wx.

Well, yes. It's mandatory for Wx now. Was pp trying to rebuild the entire Wx library from scratch?

It took me much longer to build, although turning off the realtime antivirus made a huge difference.

Now why on earth would that make a difference? That's the kind of thing that would never even occur to me.

Off the top of my head, it's installed under Alien/Wx in the arch-specific branch of the library directory. Or is it in the share directory?

See, isn't that the sort of thing that a packaging utility is supposed to figure out for itself? Cava had no problem figuring that out.

That's how things are with Strawberry—just use CPAN and things Just Work.

Same with ActiveState. Like I above, cpan Module. It'll install dmake and mingw if no compiler is found.

With ActiveState, unless they've changed things in the past two years, you need to have Visual C and nmake installed (which I don't)

You don't need this, but it's a free one-click install if you want to use it.

AS does have ppm,but—at least the version I have (5.10)—it's horrible.

I used ppm with 5.10 for a long time. It's great. I rarely had to leave it. Are you just using the AS repo, or did you check the others?

ith ActiveState, unless they've changed things in the past two years, you need to have Visual C and nmake installed (which I don't),

ActiveState has has dmake/MinGW longer than two years

ppm install dmake MinGW
ppm upgrade dmake MinGW
[download]

The basic issue issue is that it is highly advantageous to link with MSVCRT.dll because that .dll is integral to Windows and will already be on every Windows system. The clib is very dependent upon this particular.dll (malloc,stdio, etc).

AS uses VC6 and nmake for their builds because it links with MSVCRT.dll. If you were to build with say Visual Studio 2008, then that compiler will by default link with MSVCR90.dll a compiler specific library and not with MSVCRT.dll. And therefore you will have to distribute the compiler specific library with the compiled result.

As it turns out mingw(gcc) will link with MSVCRT.dll. So for inquiring minds out there, that's why these 2 compilers are recommended.

More info on AS site re: compilers and some 64 bit weirdness, one link: AS compilers for Perl modules.

So far, I've never had to build a module for Windows as I've been able to find what I need on one of the .ppd repositories. I highly recommend NOT re-inventing the wheel. If a module is available as a .ppd, install it with ppm. Its also faster than "roll your own". Note that although not all of CPAN, there are 13K+ modules at AS's repository. That covers a lot of ground!