i found the problem! having installed/uninstalled strawberry-perl several times, i had multiple entries in %PATH%, here is how it looked (the relevant snippet): 

[...]
C:\strawberry-perl\perl\bin;C:\strawberry-perl\dmake\bin;C:\strawberry
+-perl\mingw\bin;
C:\strawberry-perl\perl\bin;C:\strawberry-perl\dmake\bin;C:\strawberry
+-perl\mingw\bin;
C:\strawberry-perl\perl\bin;C:\strawberry-perl\dmake\bin;C:\strawberry
+-perl\mingw\bin;
[...]

[download]

it didn't occurred to me to look a the environmental variables of Windows, only after i discovered that running the failing command by hand, with the full path to dlltool, that command didn't fail. i don't understand exactly what happened, but those multiple entries in %PATH% confused the heck out of dlltool and made it "run in circles" :)

well it certainly seems there's a bug in how strawberry-perl manipulates environment variables and i plan to file a bug report about that. i am not complaining about it because i'm aware that that's what someone gets for playing with beta quality (read cutting edge) :)

sorry if i wasted anyones time with this.

:)))))

In reply to Re: Error compiling XS code with strawberry-perl 5.8.8-alpha-2 by asz
in thread [Solved] Error compiling XS code with strawberry-perl 5.8.8-alpha-2 by asz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.