Install PAR::Packer on Windows

I recently had need to install PAR::Packer on Windows (for those that don't know, pp is the best fully-open-source way to build a stand-alone .exe file from a Perl script, which doesn't require a Perl installation to run). I had installed pp on Windows a long time ago, but the process seems to have changed a bit so here's my experience doing it now, what problems I ran into, and how I fixed them.

Versions:

• Windows: Windows XP Professional, 32-bit
• Perl: ActivePerl 5.16.2 for Windows 32-bit
• PAR::Packer: 1.014
• Module::ScanDeps: 1.10

The Makefile.PL from PAR::Packer lists what other dependencies it has. These were all available in ActivePerl's PPM repository so they were easy to install, for example, ppm install Win32-Exe.

nmake 1.5?

A long time ago, you used to be able to download this stand-alone nmake binary from Microsoft, which replaced the usual make command from Unix. But, it seems Microsoft has pulled this download offline and they want you to install some kind of Visual Studio Express app that provides a newer version of nmake. I ended up finding a copy of nmake somewhere else on the Internet, which I've hosted here: nmake15.zip (NOTE: You might not need nmake, I later found out ActivePerl comes with dmake which worked for installing other modules, YMMV).

The only modules I needed to manually install (perl Makefile.PL; nmake; nmake install) were Module::ScanDeps and PAR::Packer, but running nmake gave this rather cryptic error message:

to undefined at C:/Perl/lib/ExtUtils/Install.pm line 1208

I found this relevant Perlmonks article. What I needed to do was open the Makefile (not Makefile.PL; the one with no extension) in Wordpad, and do a Find/Replace of {{@ARGV}} to {@ARGV}, and then nmake ran just fine.

For my project I needed to manually install Template::Toolkit, and the Makefile.PL told me to run dmake. Running this worked just fine without requiring me to manually modify the Makefile. If this is available, I imagine it would probably work better for you then nmake.

Anyway, after installing PAR::Packer's dependencies, PAR::Packer installed and ran just fine.