Re: cpan dies for bad dlltool & dmake.exe

[tobyink]

What flavour of Perl are you using? The two usual Windows ones are ActivePerl and Strawberry Perl.

If you're using ActivePerl the first port of call for installing Perl modules should be the Perl Package Manager (PPM) which is pre-installed with ActivePerl. It offers a graphical interface, and there's also a command-line ppm command.

If you wish to keep trying to install via CPAN, a quick Google search seems to suggest that dlltool is bundled with MinGW.

[VinsWorldcom]

My guess is that OP is using ActiveState Perl and MinGW as indicated by the "Set up gcc environment - 3.4.5 (mingw-vista special r3)" line I see in the CPAN build output. I used to get that line with Active / MinGW.

I've moved to Strawberry as the MinGw compiler (and associated tools like 'dlltool') are bundled with the distribution making life much easier.

VinsWorldcom@C:\Users\VinsWorldcom> which dlltool
C:\strawberry\c\bin\dlltool.exe

[hsfrey]

I'm using Active States Perl v5.12.4.

Anyway I tried PPM, as you suggested, and it appears to have worked. At least it says it did. :-)

Thank You!

So then I wondered - How come I didn't know about this? I searched the perl documentation folder, but found no reference to it.

I finally tracked down an html describing it in /Perl/Active%20Perl/html/bin/ppm.html.

I suppose it's no secret that the AS distribution is a foul, disorganized kloodge, with multiple outdated copies of each file, scattered all over the folder tree.

[dasgar]

ActiveState and Strawberry Perl take two different approaches to same problem: Windows does not have a C compiler (and make tool) that is part of the OS distribution like Linux operating systems do.

ActiveState takes the approach of using repositories of prebuilt/precompiled modules. The advantage of that approach is the end user does not need to worry about setting up a C compiler and that if there's a module available in a PPM repository, you're almost guaranteed that it will install without any issues. Unfortunately, you might also notice that in many cases the version of modules in the repository are older than the latest version available from CPAN. So if you're using ActiveState's ActivePerl, it's in your best interest to check PPM repositories for a desired module first and then install from CPAN only if you can't find it in a PPM repository.

Strawberry Perl takes another approach. They bundle all of the necessary tools needed to directly install modules from CPAN. The idea is that if you're used to installing modules in Linux, then you can do the same thing on Windows with Strawberry Perl. However, you don't have the level of guarantee of successful module install like you do with PPM repositories for ActivePerl. Although Strawberry Perl does have a ppm utility, I personally have never used it myself.

[bulk88]

Installed the free Platform SDK will get you MS's C compiler/other C tools if you don't want to pay for Visual Studio. It will be enough to compile all code that AS's PPM offers. AS's PPM archive does a good job in building thing within a 1-3 days of releasing a module, but anything that requires Unix d/make syntax, manual cmd line makefile.pl parameters, 3rd party .lib/.a files, POSIX APIs, Configure, user interactive setup during makefile.pl, won't build on AS's PPM system. http://www.cpantesters.org/ is a good website also to see if anyone can automated build/install the module.