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PERLCE(1)                             Perl Programmers Reference Guide                             PERLCE(1)



NAME
       perlce - Perl for WinCE

Building Perl for WinCE
       DESCRIPTION

       This file gives the instructions for building Perl5.8 and above for WinCE.  Please read and under-stand understand
       stand the terms under which this software is distributed.

       General explanations on cross-compiling WinCE


       •   "miniperl" is built. This is a single executable (without DLL), intended to run on Win32, and it
           will facilitate remaining build process; all binaries built after it are foreign and should not
           run locally.

           "miniperl" is built using "./win32/Makefile"; this is part of normal build process invoked as
           dependency from wince/Makefile.ce

       •   After "miniperl" is built, "configpm" is invoked to create right "Config.pm" in right place and
           its corresponding Cross.pm.

           Unlike Win32 build, miniperl will not have "Config.pm" of host within reach; it rather will use
           "Config.pm" from within cross-compilation directories.

           File "Cross.pm" is dead simple: for given cross-architecture places in @INC a path where perl
           modules are, and right "Config.pm" in that place.

           That said, "miniperl -Ilib -MConfig -we 1" should report an error, because it can not find "Con-fig.pm". "Config.pm".
           fig.pm". If it does not give an error -- wrong "Config.pm" is substituted, and resulting binaries
           will be a mess.

           "miniperl -MCross -MConfig -we 1" should run okay, and it will provide right "Config.pm" for fur-ther further
           ther compilations.

       •   During extensions build phase, a script "./win32/buldext.pl" is invoked, which in turn steps in
           "./ext" subdirectories and performs a build of each extension in turn.

           All invokes of "Makefile.PL" are provided with "-MCross" so to enable cross- compile.

       BUILD

       This section describes the steps to be performed to build PerlCE.  You may find additional informa-tion information
       tion about building perl for WinCE at <http://perlce.sourceforge.net> and some pre-built binaries.

       Tools & SDK

       For compiling, you need following:

       * Microsoft Embedded Visual Tools
       * Microsoft Visual C++
       * Rainer Keuchel's celib-sources
       * Rainer Keuchel's console-sources

       Needed source files can be downloaded at <http://www.rainer-keuchel.de/wince/dirlist.html>

       Make

       Normally you only need to edit "./win32/ce-helpers/compile.bat" to reflect your system and run it.

       File "./win32/ce-helpers/compile.bat" is actually a wrapper to call "nmake -f makefile.ce" with
       appropriate parameters and it accepts extra parameters and forwards them to "nmake" command as addi-tional additional
       tional arguments. You should pass target this way.

       To prepare distribution you need to do following:

       * go to "./win32" subdirectory
       * edit file "./win32/ce-helpers/compile.bat"
       * run compile.bat
       * run compile.bat dist

       "Makefile.ce" has "CROSS_NAME" macro, and it is used further to refer to your cross-compilation
       scheme. You could assign a name to it, but this is not necessary, because by default it is assigned
       after your machine configuration name, such as "wince-sh3-hpc-wce211", and this is enough to distin-guish distinguish
       guish different builds at the same time. This option could be handy for several different builds on
       same platform to perform, say, threaded build. In a following example we assume that all required
       environment variables are set properly for C cross-compiler (a special *.bat file could fit perfectly
       to this purpose) and your "compile.bat" has proper "MACHINE" parameter set, to, say,
       "wince-mips-pocket-wce300".

         compile.bat
         compile.bat dist
         compile.bat CROSS_NAME=mips-wce300-thr "USE_ITHREADS=define" "USE_IMP_SYS=define" "USE_MULTI=define"
         compile.bat CROSS_NAME=mips-wce300-thr "USE_ITHREADS=define" "USE_IMP_SYS=define" "USE_MULTI=define" dist

       If all goes okay and no errors during a build, you'll get two independent distributions:
       "wince-mips-pocket-wce300" and "mips-wce300-thr".

       Target "dist" prepares distribution file set. Target "zipdist" performs same as "dist" but addition-ally additionally
       ally compresses distribution files into zip archive.

       NOTE: during a build there could be created a number (or one) of "Config.pm" for cross-compilation
       ("foreign" "Config.pm") and those are hidden inside "../xlib/$(CROSS_NAME)" with other auxilary
       files, but, and this is important to note, there should be no "Config.pm" for host miniperl.  If
       you'll get an error that perl could not find Config.pm somewhere in building process this means some-thing something
       thing went wrong. Most probably you forgot to specify a cross-compilation when invoking miniperl.exe
       to Makefile.PL When building an extension for cross-compilation your command line should look like

         ..\miniperl.exe -I..\lib -MCross=mips-wce300-thr Makefile.PL

       or just

         ..\miniperl.exe -I..\lib -MCross Makefile.PL

       to refer a cross-compilation that was created last time.

       All questions related to building for WinCE devices could be asked in perlce-user@lists.source-forge.net perlce-user@lists.sourceforge.net
       forge.net mailing list.

Using Perl on WinCE
       DESCRIPTION

       PerlCE is currently linked with a simple console window, so it also works on non-hpc devices.

       The simple stdio implementation creates the files "stdin.txt", "stdout.txt" and "stderr.txt", so you
       might examine them if your console has only a liminted number of cols.

       When exitcode is non-zero, a message box appears, otherwise the console closes, so you might have to
       catch an exit with status 0 in your program to see any output.

       stdout/stderr now go into the files "/perl-stdout.txt" and "/perl-stderr.txt."

       PerlIDE is handy to deal with perlce.

       LIMITATIONS

       No fork(), pipe(), popen() etc.

       ENVIRONMENT

       All environment vars must be stored in HKLM\Environment as strings. They are read at process startup.

       PERL5LIB
           Usual perl lib path (semi-list).

       PATH
           Semi-list for executables.

       TMP - Tempdir.

       UNIXROOTPATH
           - Root for accessing some special files, i.e. "/dev/null", "/etc/services".

       ROWS/COLS
           - Rows/cols for console.

       HOME
           - Home directory.

       CONSOLEFONTSIZE
           - Size for console font.

       You can set these with cereg.exe, a (remote) registry editor or via the PerlIDE.

       REGISTRY

       To start perl by clicking on a perl source file, you have to make the according entries in HKCR (see
       "ce-helpers/wince-reg.bat").  cereg.exe (which must be executed on a desktop pc with ActiveSync) is
       reported not to work on some devices.  You have to create the registry entries by hand using a reg-istry registry
       istry editor.

       XS

       The following Win32-Methods are built-in:

               newXS("Win32::GetCwd", w32_GetCwd, file);
               newXS("Win32::SetCwd", w32_SetCwd, file);
               newXS("Win32::GetTickCount", w32_GetTickCount, file);
               newXS("Win32::GetOSVersion", w32_GetOSVersion, file);
               newXS("Win32::IsWinNT", w32_IsWinNT, file);
               newXS("Win32::IsWin95", w32_IsWin95, file);
               newXS("Win32::IsWinCE", w32_IsWinCE, file);
               newXS("Win32::CopyFile", w32_CopyFile, file);
               newXS("Win32::Sleep", w32_Sleep, file);
               newXS("Win32::MessageBox", w32_MessageBox, file);
               newXS("Win32::GetPowerStatus", w32_GetPowerStatus, file);
               newXS("Win32::GetOemInfo", w32_GetOemInfo, file);
               newXS("Win32::ShellEx", w32_ShellEx, file);

       BUGS

       Opening files for read-write is currently not supported if they use stdio (normal perl file handles).

       If you find bugs or if it does not work at all on your device, send mail to the address below. Please
       report the details of your device (processor, ceversion, devicetype (hpc/palm/pocket)) and the date
       of the downloaded files.

       INSTALLATION

       Currently installation instructions are at <http://perlce.sourceforge.net/>.

       After installation & testing processes will stabilize, information will be more precise.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
       The port for Win32 was used as a reference.

History of WinCE port
       5.6.0
           Initial port of perl to WinCE. It was performed in separate directory named "wince". This port
           was based on contents of "./win32" directory.  "miniperl" was not built, user must have HOST perl
           and properly edit "makefile.ce" to reflect this.

       5.8.0
           wince port was kept in the same "./wince" directory, and "wince/Makefile.ce" was used to invoke
           native compiler to create HOST miniperl, which then facilitates cross-compiling process.  Exten-sion Extension
           sion building support was added.

       5.9.4
           Two directories "./win32" and "./wince" were merged, so perlce build process comes in "./win32"
           directory.

AUTHORS
       Rainer Keuchel <coyxc@rainer-keuchel.de>
           provided initial port of Perl, which appears to be most essential work, as it was a breakthrough
           on having Perl ported at all.  Many thanks and obligations to Rainer!

       Vadim Konovalov
           made further support of WinCE port.



perl v5.8.9                                      2007-11-17                                        PERLCE(1)