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.