I have a piece of open-source software I wrote ( http://www.lightandmatter.com/ogr/ogr.html ) that is mainly meant to run on linux, but I was also able to make it run on Windows using pp. I tested some version of the software on some version of Windows, and it worked, so I put the .exe up on my web site. Recently a user contacted me to say that it wouldn't run for him on Windows. He said he was getting an error message about running out of memory, which doesn't make a lot of sense, because the program really isn't that big. I tested the current version of my code in Wine and it worked. I got access to a Windows machine to test it on, and sure enough, it doesn't work -- which could be due to either a change in the version of Windows or a change in my software. When I double-click on the .exe, first Windows pops up a dialog box asking if I want to run it with reduced privileges. Regardless of whether I say yes or no, all I see after that is a black DOS prompt window that quickly flashes on the screen, then goes away. The Perl/Tk gui never actually runs.

My gut reaction is to say, "Oh, well, I have zero Windows skills and no convenient Windows machine for testing and development, so I'll just stop offering a Windows executable." It's noncommercial software, and I don't feel any strong desire to put lots of work into maintaining Windows support. Before I do that, does anyone have any other suggestions? E.g., is there some known problem with pp on new versions of Windows?

The program depends on Perl/Tk, plus a few other libraries. By trial and error, I found that pp wasn't smart enough to include all the dependencies, so I had to tell it about some of them by hand. Here is the command line for pp that suffices to give me an executable that runs in Wine: 

pp -M JSON::PP -M JSON::PP58 -M Tie::Hash::NamedCapture -M Tk::Bitmap 
+-o opengrade.exe opengrade.pl

[download]

Does it matter that my development machine is x64 and the target machines are 32-bit?

Thanks in advance!

-Ben

In reply to Windows .exe produced by pp no longer runs? by bcrowell2

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