This page describes the work required to port Misterhouse to run under Activestate Perl 5.12. Hopefully this page will be useful for Windows porting in the future. Disclaimer: I did not test very many of the features of Misterhouse and had only a handful of the common code files enabled. Please update this page if you find more issues that need to be resolved.

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I made a basic install of the Activestate Perl 5.12 and didn't install any other packages http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/versions

code format="perl" Index: bin/mh

--- bin/mh (revision 1970) +++ bin/mh (working copy) @@ -192,9 +192,12 @@

             elsif ($build < 800) {
                 push @INC, "${Pgm_Path}/../lib/site_win56";
             }

- else { + elsif ($build < 900) {

                 push @INC, "${Pgm_Path}/../lib/site_win58";
             }

+ elsif ($build < 1300 and $build &gt; 1199) { + push @INC, "${Pgm_Path}/../lib/site_win512"; + }

         }
         require 'handy_utilities.pl';
     }

code

The versions of Win32::Registry and Win32API::Registry installed in the ./lib/site directory are too old for modules in Activestate Perl 5.12 and Win32::setupsup. These files were moved from ./lib/site to each of the existing ./lib/site_winXX directories for backwards compatibility. The affected files are: code format="bash" lib/site/Win32API/Registry.pm lib/site/Win32API/Registry lib/site/Win32API/Registry/cRegistry.pc lib/site/Win32/Registry.pm code

Activestate is no longer providing the Win32::setupsup package. I'm not sure why but it might be because there are compile errors. I decided to build it from CPAN and then create a ./lib/site_win512 folder in the repository so others will be spared. I have the instructions here for future builds on new Perl releases.

This is a real pain because setupsup will not compile with gcc and I don't own Visual Studio C++. However I did figure out how to compile under VS C++ Express with a "trick" to over come features missing from the Express version. Primarily MFC is not supported and this required a bit of trickery. Steps:

• Download and install VS C++ Express (I used Version 2010)
• Open the Visual Studio Command Prompt

• Now for the VS Express trick

• Prepare the installation directory in the MH code base

• Run cpan and download "but don't make" the setupsup package

• cd in to the cpan build directory:

• Apply the diff to setupsup.cpp if needed.

• Create the Makefile specifying a custom install dir

Oracle has really FUBARed the Berkeley DB by changing the license so that it is no longer compatible with Perl. Because of this Activestate will not provide a PPM for it. I'm not sure if we can distribute the compiled DB_File once it is linked to libdb because MH has the same incompatible license as Perl. So.... I didn't add these files to the repository, rather I built and installed them in my Activestate path. At a minimum we may need to make users go through this when installing the first time. We should also consider ripping DBM support out of MH replacing it with SQLite (DBD::SQLite and Tie::Hash::DBD); both are available from Activestate and CPAN. Install DB_File on Strawberry Perl - This is not exactly what I did but I based my process on it with some adaptions for ActiveState and CPAN.

• Find, download and install the Berkeley DB db-4.3.29 from Oracle

• Open a standard command prompt

• Run cpan and download "but don't make" the DB_File package

• cd in to the cpan build directory:

• Edit the config.in file adding correct paths and lib name

• Apply patch to C:\Program Files\Sleepycat Software\Berkeley DB 4.3.29\include\db.h

• Make and Install the Package

• Now we have a choice:

1. 1. 1. Windows CPU and task mnoitor

1. 1. 1. Out of environment space

config.sys:   shell=command.com /e:8000 /p
autoexec.bat: set comspec=c:\command.com