RESOLUTION: Using CPAN.PM on Win32: How Direct to Proper Perl Location

mcdavis941_at_netscape.net
Date: 01/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 13:27:45 -0500
To: beginners@perl.org, perl-win32-users@listserv.ActiveState.com

Hi, this message is to let you know the resolution of an issue I posted on 25 Jan 2004.  I post this for the benefit of anyone Googling on the relevent keywords.

My original post listed an error message for a condition in which neither CPAN.pm, CPANPLUS.pm nor Makefile.PL (for multiple packages) could locate perl.h.  The original error message, in brief, was:

    Error: Unable to locate installed Perl libraries or Perl source code.

One work-around was posted, which allowed Makefile.PL to work by adding PERL_SRC=D:\app\xampp\perl to the commandline.

Some research turned up the root cause.  I was using a prebuilt Perl (included with an all-in-one Apache+mod_perl+Perl+PHP+MySQL distribution, called XAMPP for Windows, available via SourceForge).  It turns out that the default installation for XAMPP does two questionable things:

1.  It does not install perl.h.  This was resolved by getting perl.h (and several other Perl .h sources) from a source distribution for the XAMPP version of Perl, 5.8.0 build 806, and placing them in Perl's lib directory.
2.  It does not support installation anywhere other than in the root directory (and possibly nowhere other than the C drive).  Looking at Perl's lib\Config.pm showed several paths pointing to C:\xampp, when in fact I had installed it (using the XAMPP installer) in D:\app\xampp.  Editing these paths to point to the correct directories solved the problem.

Having corrected both these issues, everything works as expected.

This morning, the authors of XAMPP confirmed that this is in fact an issue with XAMPP.  I have to say that, other than this hiccup, I've been pretty happy with it.

Perl:            5.8.0, ActiveState Build 806, with various updated individual modules
OS:              MSWin32
Perl Directory:  D:\app\xampp\perl
$CPAN::VERSION   1.61

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