Modules that require compiled extensions

John R. Dennis (jdennis@ultranet.com)
Fri, 3 Jan 1997 10:50:53 -0500 (EST) 

[ Note - this email was cross posted to both the Perl-Win32-Users list
         and the libwww-perl mailing list because the question
         pertains to both - John ]

In my spare time I've been trying to make use of some of perl net/www
modules on my NT system. I kind of expected this would be relatively
easy, e.g. download the module from CPAN, install it, and use it.

Many of these modules have a long list of other required modules. For
example libnet depends on io::socket. When I went to install
io::socket I discovered that it depended on a compiled extention to
perl. I believe there are other examples of modules requiring compiled
extensions (but I didn't get that far yet to enumerate them all).

I'm not necessarily intimidated by having to rebuild perl. When I
worked on UNIX I used to download new versions of perl all the time
and build perl from scratch and install it. But I've discovered that
in Win32 most of the basic configure/build/install stuff that comes
with perl does not work :-( That makes me a bit aprehensive and
suggests that it will not be a trival exercise to get a new version of
perl built with the required extension modules (I do not doubt I can
successfully do this, but past experience on Win32 suggests it will
require a significant investment of time before it builds and exectues
cleanly).

Given the number of folks that seem to be running with the net/www
modules on Win32 (based on email volume) I'm beginning to wonder if
I've taken a wrong turn here because that would imply that lots of
folks are building perl for win32 themselves with extension
support, but in the several months I've been tapped into
perl Win32 mailing list, the various perl Win32 FAQ's, and the libwww
mailing list, I have never seen this come up as a topic of discussion,
which I expect it would.

So, before I invest time in rebuilding perl with extension support for
Win32 I thought I would do a sanity check and make sure I'm going down
the right road or to find out if I can benefit from the previous
experiences of others.

John Dennis
jdennis@ultranet.com