•pp and PAR::Packer cannot be installed on Strawberry Perl 5.18.2. It just doesn't work. I tried with cpanm, cpan, and ppm. It fails on all accounts.

What errors do you see when you tried with cpan?

•The default Par::Packer from cpan that is gotten is 1.27, though the most recent version on CPAN says, as of yesterday, 1.28. I don't know why.

I downloaded the 1.28 version of PAR::Packer just now and transferred it to a server that is not web connected and installed it using dmake. It works. It's on Windows Server 2008 with Strawberry Perl 5.16.2 64 bit. I had to upgrade PAR to 1.010, 5.16.2 comes with a slightly older version. There were only a couple of other modules that I had to install. Getopt::ArgvFile and Module::ScanDeps. I already had Test::Requires.

•pp doesn't seem to install with most versions of Strawberry perl. PP has been broken for years with SP.

My workstation runs Windows 7 and has Strawberry Perl 5.18.2 installed. I just tested pp and it works. To see which version I have and what is available I opened the interactive cpan client from the command line and then did the following.

cpan> i PAR
Module id = PAR
    CPAN_USERID  RSCHUPP (Roderich Schupp <rschupp@cpan.org>)
    CPAN_VERSION 1.010
    CPAN_FILE    R/RS/RSCHUPP/PAR-1.010.tar.gz
    UPLOAD_DATE  2015-07-13
    MANPAGE      PAR - Perl Archive Toolkit
    INST_FILE    C:\strawberry\perl\vendor\lib\PAR.pm
    INST_VERSION 1.007

cpan> i PAR::Packer
Module id = PAR::Packer
    CPAN_USERID  RSCHUPP (Roderich Schupp <rschupp@cpan.org>)
    CPAN_VERSION 1.027
    CPAN_FILE    R/RS/RSCHUPP/PAR-Packer-1.028.tar.gz
    UPLOAD_DATE  2015-11-19
    MANPAGE      PAR::Packer - PAR Packager
    INST_FILE    C:\strawberry\perl\vendor\lib\PAR\Packer.pm
    INST_VERSION 1.025
[download]

The file version above shows 28 but CPAN thinks it is 27. I just did an "install PAR::Packer" and it worked. INST_VERSION is now 1.028. I just ran pp and created an exe that runs.

If you don't want to try a fresh install of Strawberry Perl you might try the portable version. You can install that to its own folder on your hard drive and then run cpan from its command line.