I tried with active perl version 5.8.8 and the Win32::Symlink module got installed. But it created only directory junction despite passing a file.
To (hard) link a file on Windows, you don't need a module, just use the built-in Perl
link function. For example:
link $oldfile, $newfile or die "link failed: $!";
You should only use
Win32::Symlink for directories, not files.
That's because Windows junctions are for directories only; see
Hard Links and Junctions and
Creating Symbolic Links
and
Symbolic Links for details.
As for the Win32::Symlink 0.04 PPM failures you mentioned, I just tried building it from source and it failed to compile due to an incompatibility with struct REPARSE_DATA_BUFFER between Win32::Symlink and the Microsoft header files, so I just raised a ticket #71879. BTW, I was able to get it to build simply by hacking
tclreadlink.c, changing REPARSE_DATA_BUFFER to MY_REPARSE_DATA_BUFFER.