Question

I am trying to build Win32::Daemon by myself. The reason I not use CPAN is because I want to dig deeper into the working of Perl modules. In the end I hope to come up with a solution for another problem by seeing this working (not of importance here).

I would see 3 options to build the module: cygwin, mingw, microsoft compiler (cl)

On MinGW it reports that it is not supported (simple if in the Makefile.PL) which expands to more errors once I modify the check to match MinGW
On Cygwin it complains about tchar.h which, as I found out, is a Windows header (MinGW does have it).

But my real goal anyway is building it with the MS compiler, so while any compilation that does not require any special libs (like it would do with cygwin I suppose) will more.

So now here goes my nmake output from running just name /f Makefile:

NMAKE : fatal error U1073: "C:/Program" could not be created.
Stop.

I roughly translated the error message from german, but the statement is simple.
What I see here seems to be a path problem (probably the spaces). I also notice the forward slash. The Makefile was created by the Makefile.PL script (I am using Active Perl v5.12.1):

use strict;
use warnings;

use Config qw(%Config);
use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;

unless ($^O eq "MSWin32" || $^O eq "cygwin") {
    die "OS unsupported\n";
}

require Win32;

my %param = (
    NAME          => 'Win32::Daemon',
    VERSION_FROM  => 'Daemon.pm',
    DEFINE        => '-DPERL_NO_GET_CONTEXT',
    OBJECT        => 'CCallbackList$(OBJ_EXT) CCallbackTimer$(OBJ_EXT) Constant$(OBJ_EXT) CWinStation$(OBJ_EXT) Daemon$(OBJ_EXT) ServiceThread$(OBJ_EXT)',
    XS            => { 'Daemon.xs' => 'Daemon.cpp' },
);
$param{INC} .= ' -EHsc' if $Config{'cc'} =~ /^cl/i;
$param{NO_META} = 1 if eval "$ExtUtils::MakeMaker::VERSION" >= 6.10_03;
WriteMakefile(%param);

sub MY::xs_c {
    '
.xs.cpp:
    $(PERL) -I$(PERL_ARCHLIB) -I$(PERL_LIB) $(XSUBPP) $(XSPROTOARG) $(XSUBPPARGS) $*.xs >xstmp.c && $(MV) xstmp.c $*.cpp
';
}

I don’t know much about the MakeMaker but I don’t see anything here that I could fix and would expect that it boils down to fixing the Makefile itself by hand. I tried a couple of things like quoting but nothing helped.

The thing is, I am used to problems like this when building on Windows, but normally this is for tools that were created for Unix. This one is explicitly ONLY Windows and so I would expect it to work out of the box. So I figure that I am doing something wrong.

Any help on where to find the solution?
Thanks in advance.

Edit/Addition: I tried this on another Win7 machine with Active Perl 5.16.x and it worked like a charm. I looked at the different output from this machine and the current one which fails when running perl Makefile.PL and I recieve the following output:

... Detected uninstalled Perl.  Trying to continue.
Unable to find a perl 5 (by these names: C:\Program Files\Perl64\bin\perl.exe perl.exe perl5.exe perl5.12.1.exe miniperl.exe, in these dirs: . [...] C:\Program Files\Perl64\site\bin C:\Program Files\Perl64\bin [...])
Have \progra~1\perl64\lib
Want \temp\perl---please-run-the-install-script---\lib
Writing Makefile for Win32::Daemon

I truncated the output. Now please someone explain to me: Why can I run perl Makefile.PL or perl -v but it does not find my Perl in the exact directory it is in? I reinstalled it but it did not work…

Answer 1

Okay I finally seem to have solved this after hours of searching. The problem lies within multiple issues.

The first command of “uninstalled perl” does not make any sense to be, but you can fix it, by supplying perl Makefile.PL PERL_SRC="C\:Program Files\Perl64". Warning: This did not work in a command shell for me, I had to use powershell, because he would not treat the path correctly. You maybe need to juggle with this a bit. Note: In the end I fixed it by installing the original Active Perl, not the one provided by my installer (company software distribution)

Now to the issue of not finding perl: This is a problem with spaces in the path. I fixed this (seemingly) by creating a symlink without spaces. Now perl Makefile.PL does not throw any errors, but nmake -f "Makefile" failed. So the solution really was: Do not have spaces in your perl-path! This sucks, and quite frankfly in 2012 this shouldn’t be a problem any more but here you go.

Thanks for all the effort everyone put in, this was a tough one to solve.