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

I should start by saying that I was pleasantly surprised to see an msi file in the Rakudo distribution - in the past Perl 6 on Windows has been difficult to build, and really only a Linux compile and build has been practical. So this is a welcome step forward. But...

Installing rakudo-star.2010.07.msi creates a Rakudo directory, but it only has a bare-bones system. Very little documentation, and no modules. Looking at rakudo-star.2010.07.tar.gz I see there are other wonderous goodies, modules, pod files, tools: none of which are in the .msi version. Is that intentional?

I found this at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo: "These tarballs do not contain the documentation or modules found in Rakudo Star. It is strongly recommended that you download a Rakudo Star distribution unless you are a developer looking to hack on the compiler internals."
So it looks like the .msi is a bundle from one of those tarballs, and is not the same as the distribution.

By the way, I tried to run perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot on Windows XP (I have gcc in the path) but got continual 0xC0000005 (memory access violation) exceptions from test_5464.exe. I also tried running buid\module_install.pl to install the modules into the directory tree created by the msi, but I couldn't figure-out what the arguments should be, and could not find any doc for it in the release files, from Google, or from Rakudo.org.

So, how do I install those modules into the .msi release tree?

Update: I also tried to install proto.pl, which appears to be what I need, but 
perl -MLWP::UserAgent -e"LWP::UserAgent->new->mirror( 'http://github.c
+om/masak/proto/raw/master/proto', 'proto.pl')"

[download]
did not appear to do anything (no errors reported).

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Rakudo on Windows - the poor relation?
by moritz (Cardinal) on Aug 11, 2010 at 09:34 UTC
    The modules should be in C:\Rakudo\lib\parrot\2.6.0\langauges\perl6\lib. If not, please submit a bug report by writing an email to rakudobug@perl.org

    The README and the book should be installed into C:\Rakudo\docs\.

    Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.
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      Yes they are! I did not expect to find the Perl modules under the parrot directory tree. Sorry!

      As for the docs, Rakudo\docs (from the .msi) contains the cheetsheet and UsingPerl6-draft.pdf, whereas rakudo-star-2010.07\rakudo\docs (from the tar.gz file) contains a different set of documents, including many pod files. This includes running.pod which you referred to in a previous post.
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        Yes they are! I did not expect to find the Perl modules under the parrot directory tree.

        It's just there because rakudo re-uses the parrot installation folders. And as a user you shouldn't have to care where the modules are, as long as you can just use them.

        As for the docs, Rakudo\docs (from the .msi) contains the cheetsheet and UsingPerl6-draft.pdf, whereas rakudo-star-2010.07\rakudo\docs (from the tar.gz file) contains a different set of documents, including many pod files. This includes running.pod which you referred to in a previous post.

        running.pod is meant to be converted into a manual page in the installation step, and result in man/man1/rakudo.1 (and perl6.1) in the parrot tree - I agree that it's not ideal for windows.

        Currently we only have one windows developer, so we appreciate any help with windows packaging.

        Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.
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Re: Rakudo on Windows - the poor relation?
by syphilis (Archbishop) on Aug 11, 2010 at 10:36 UTC
    ... got continual 0xC0000005 (memory access violation) exceptions

    You're using gcc-4.x.x ? Try adding -Wl,--enable-runtime-pseudo-reloc-v2 to the g++ command line during the build process. That should fix the problem, I believe.
    It's a known libstdc++ issue, so you may find that installing a gcc that has been built from a more recent source also takes care of it (without any need to add anything to the g++ command line).

    Cheers,
    Rob
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      Thanks for the suggestion, but I was using the compiled version from the .msi file.
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Re: Rakudo on Windows - the poor relation?
by Anonymous Monk on Aug 11, 2010 at 09:38 UTC
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