LloydRice has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am trying to install the PDL module using 5.16.3 on a 64-bit running Win7. I also have the Watcom compiler installed, so I have renamed the Watcom make from nmake.exe to a backup name. It seems that is not enough. I have saved both STDOUT and STDERR to (big) files, but they're not much help to me. The final msg says "Install seems impossible at this time". Where should I look for clues? Any major things to look for in the error output?

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Re: Installing PDL
by dcmertens (Scribe) on Jan 18, 2014 at 03:37 UTC

    The PDL release manager, Chris Marshall, is a Windows developer. He works on Cygwin, but he also ensures that PDL works on Strawberry before a release. I'm pretty sure that sisyphus ensures things compile under ActiveState's setup, too. In other words, PDL is well supported on Windows these days.

    I have never heard of Watcom before your post, and I suspect that the other PDL developers either haven't heard of it or don't use it. As such, any trouble you've encountered is unlikely to have been caught by our developers. Your best bet is to switch to Strawberry Perl or Cygwin. If you really want it to compile under Watcom, I strongly suspect you'll have to do some debugging. Patches are always welcome, but there's no knowing how many build-chain peculiarities you'll have to work around.

    But the first thing you should do is take this conversation to the PDL mailing list. That is the official channel for support.

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      Watcom has been a BIG NAME in compilers since CP/M days.

      I do have to admit, however: I'm unsure if "has been... since" or "was...back in" is more appropriate.

      Come, let us reason together: Spirit of the Monastery
[reply]

        My error was in the way I was trying to install. When I used the ActiveState installer, PPM, everything went well.

        As for WATCOM, you are correct, WW, that it has been around for a while. I first used it shortly after the CP/M days. The original creator was bought out, maybe as an attempt to kill it, but it has since become available as a public domain system. The support community is a bit on the "serious hacker" side. As far as I know, there are no more "user oriented" forums. But it does work up to x86 and NT models. To my knowledge, there is no support for 64-bit. But HEY, I'm really a Perl fan. So enough about C.

[reply]

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