ObviousGuy's Journal: I was barking up the wrong tree

Well now that the weekend has passed and I've had a full day to try my hand at getting CPAN.pm to correctly compile Text::Diff I have finally figured it out.

First I tried to download MinGW to give me Windows binaries of gcc and companions. That worked fine and now I have about all I need as compilers go. It didn't solve my problem at all because Text::Diff still didn't compile.

That's not exactly right. Text::Diff didn't even get the chance to compile. It was stuck back in MakeMaker.pm trying to build the project with no success. The line $(PM_TO_BLIB) in Makefile kept spitting up no matter what I did.

So after several hours of fiddling with it, I finally gave up and got myself a cup of coffee (304yen for a tall cup of coffee at Starbucks. Outrageous!). When I came back I surfed the web a little and came across this posting which jogged my memory a little.

PPM is the Perl Package Manager for Activestate Perl. It is a CPAN replacement as far as I can tell and it *just works* which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for CPAN.pm.

So in five minutes I got the modules installed and a test program running and all is right with the world.

Thanks to all who offered their help. It turns out I was wandering down the wrong Unix alleyway instead of in the brightly lit Windows main street.