Actually I think its a mixture of CPAN related issues and Cygwin related issues. All I know is that installing anything development into a path with spaces On Win32 is just a really good way to get yourself frustrated and annoyed at some point or another.

Sure you can argue that it shouldnt be like this, and that things should work fine, and all of that, but ultimately its my experience that it doesn't, and that its a lot easier to avoid the problem outright than figure out the workarounds later.

This works on Windows too, but the Windows shell (cmd.exe) only knows about double quotes:

o conf make '"C:\tmp\path with spaces\bin\nmake.exe"'
[download]

works and allows to use a directory with whitespace in its name. The same should also be done for the gzip and tar paths, and also for Perl itself (especially $^X :-) ). See also RT 17877 - the approach proposed by you to add quoting if it becomes necessary is what I do as well.

I had a quick play with altering the configuration string and could not make it work - I may not have tried double quoting. Windows handles the command line differently than *nix for quote characters of various types in any case and that may have been where the problem was.

Mostly, Windows is very braindead about commandlines and doesn’t handle quoting in any particular fashion at all, so every program involved in the execution of another adds its own conventions/complexities; sometimes irresolvable ones.

Makeshifts last the longest.