I undertand your frustrations and also your motivation for wanting a precompiled binary. However, I would actually like to build Parrot for myself, on my own machine using the toolset that I have.

BCC handles building Perl 5.6.1/5.8 natively--provided you grab the CPAN source distribution and not the Active State sources.

I am quite happy to put in the work to evolve a build machanism to suit my configuration, but I need some help getting started. The existing mechanism is very sophisticated, possibly with an eye to the future requirements, but doesn't seem to have any simple mechanism for allowing modifications to the process. I haven't yet found any way of tracing out the intermediate steps of the process so that I can work out what and where needs to be change to accomodate my setup.

To this end, I am hoping to start with a simplistic, single level makefile process. If I can get that to work, then I may be able to work backwards from that to seeing what changes/additions are required to the existing mechanism.

I sincerely feel that if the build process can be made a little more freindly to the non-unix environments, then a wider audience of contributors to the overall project would be enabled. It might then be possible to get some non-unix people in on the ground floor (or at least the first) instead of having to wait for a commercial concern to do the work with all the knock-on effects and delays that implies.

I currently have the time, a certain amount of expertise in areas that possibly fall outside the core competence of the existing concentrations of the development team, and would like to get involved. I'd go right ahead and just sign up to the mailing lists, but without having at least managed to get Parrot up and running, most of what I read about the internals is going right over my head. I see little benefit to the project in my turning my system into a unix-clone in order to work on the project as I would then be operating in a field outside of my best knowledge and would always be playing catchup to the those who's knowledge and expertise is far in advance of my own--whether it was Cygwin, linux, or unix.

It would seem better to me to concentrate on trying to contribute in thise areas where I have some existing skills especially as there appears to be an area where the project currently has a lack of them--or at least a lack of time in which to expend energies on development and testing on the Win32 platform.