Welcome to libwin32 version 0.10. WHAT ---- This is a bundle of "Win32-only" extensions that provides a quick migration path for people wanting to use the core support for win32 in perl 5.004 and later. It features the complete set of Win32-specific extensions available from CPAN that could previously only be used with Activeware's "Perl for Win32"(TM). Most other non-Win32 extensions should build fairly smoothly using the MakeMaker support available in perl 5.004 and later, so they are not included in this bundle. This distribution has been pre-compiled for the x86 architecture. See the "WHAT TO DO" section for installation instructions. WHAT HAS CHANGED ---------------- The top level "Changes" file contains a version by version overview of the most significant changes. This release has the following changes over the previous one: + Chris Madsen has rethought and rewritten the IPC related modules. The Win32::Event module is new. In his own words: The Win32::IPC modules Win32::ChangeNotify Win32::Event Win32::IPC Win32::Mutex Win32::Semaphore have been almost completely rewritten and are now at version 1.00. The rather inconsistent ActiveWare interface is still supported, but you should really use the newer and more powerful interface (using lower case method names). Consult the documentation for each module for details on how to convert from the old interface. In addition, Win32::Process has been slightly altered to work with Win32::IPC. Process objects should now work with Win32::IPC's wait_* functions (they were supposed to work before, but they didn't). You will have to load Win32::IPC yourself, because Win32::Process does not. + Yet more OLE fixes from Jan Dubois . + NetAdmin enhancements from Jutta Klebe + Updated FileSecurity to base version 0.67. + Win32::Registry sports additional functions that correspond to the Win32 Registry API functions. + Misc. changes - fixed buggy InitiateSystemShutdown() - New compatibility XSUBs: MsgBox(), LoadLibrary(), FreeLibrary(), GetProcAddress(), RegisterServer(), UnregisterServer() + Other minor bugs have been fixed. See "Changes" files in individual module subdirectories. Many thanks to all the contributors. WHAT IT HAS ----------- This bundle contains: * The collection of modules originally distributed by the Activeware folks as part of their "Perl for Win32"(TM) port. These have been modified so that they will build under MakeMaker using perls greater than 5.004 and Visual C++. Along the way, I have added many bugfixes to make these modules work correctly. The complete list of Activeware extensions is available: Win32/ChangeNotify Win32/EventLog Win32/File Win32/FileSecurity Win32/IPC Win32/Mutex Win32/NetAdmin Win32/NetResource Win32/OLE Win32/Process Win32/Registry Win32/Semaphore Win32/Service Win32/WinError Note this covers all of the Win32 extensions distributed by Activeware (as of build 315). These extensions have been re-engineered to use the XS interface language, yet the changes are compatible with the originals. This should minimize any problems for people wanting to migrate their application to 5.004. The design of these modules is subject to change in future. The only deliberately incompatible change is in the Win32::OLE module. While the Activeware port used the "OLE::" and "Win32::" namespaces for the functionality contained in this module, this port uses "Win32::OLE::" consistently. For a list of other incompatibilities in Win32::OLE, see the embedded documentation in "OLE/OLE.pm". * The following five modules maintained by Aldo Calpini : Win32/Clipboard Win32/Console Win32/Internet Win32/Shortcut Win32/Sound These also have been converted back to XS. I have added bug fixes as I found them during the conversion process. * Two useful modules maintained by Dave Roth . Win32/ODBC Win32/Pipe These have only received just the bare modifications needed to build them under MakeMaker. *.xs are really C/C++ files masquerading as XS. Win32/ODBC hasn't been tested much. WHAT TO DO ---------- You can either use the binaries that come with this distribution, or choose to recompile them from scratch (recommended if you have a C compiler that is capable of building perl). If you want to use the precompiled binaries: + Download: http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/GSAR/perl5.00402-bindist04-bc.zip Unzip that, thoroughly read the README file, and install it. Note that the it comes with an older version of libwin32, but you'll be completely replacing that in the next few steps. + Make sure the newly installed perl is available from the command line. Typing "perl -v" should report version 5.004_02. If not, make sure you've added the installed location of perl.exe to your PATH correctly. + cd to wherever you uncompressed this distribution, and type "install.bat". This should take care of installing everything in the right place. + Many modules come with their own test files. You may want to use them as a source of examples. Many of the test files will only run on Windows NT, others may require Windows NT 4.0, and still others may require Administrator privileges, or a full fledged Windows network. The following applies only if you want to rebuild using your C compiler. Otherwise, skip to the next section. This set of modules will build with perl5.004_01 and later on the Windows NT platform. Building on Windows 95 is not supported (but it may be possible if you use the 4DOS command shell, but YMMV). + First you need to build perl 5.004_01 or later (you will need either Visual C++ 4.x+ or Borland C++ 5.02+), and install it. See README.win32 in the perl distribution for details on how to build perl for the Win32 platform. + That done, you need to extract this distribution into an NTFS partition (the tests in the FileSecurity module and Net* modules will fail otherwise). The testsuite for OLE needs Excel to run. NetAdmin will only work if you have some kind of live network connection, and are in a domain with a properly configured domain controller. NetResource requires that you be part of a domain or workgroup. You may also need Administrator privileges for running some of the tests. If one or more of these conditions will not be met, you may wish to build in the subdirectories one by one. The steps below will work either at the toplevel directory, or in each of the individual extension subdirectories. + You need either MS Visual C++ (NetAdmin needs ver. 4.x+, Internet needs ver. 5.0. ver. 2.0 should suffice for the others) or Borland C++ 5.02. Make sure you have the full installation of either of these compilers ("Minimal" installations or CDROM-based installations may have problems finding all the libraries). + If the Internet extension doesn't build due to lack of libraries (the wininet.h header is included), fetch the libraries from Aldo Calpini's website: "http://www.divinf.it/dada/perl/internet/". Look for a file named "WinInet.zip". If the wininet.h or wininet.dll in your system are newer than the ones in WinInet.zip, discard them before copying WinInet.lib into the Internet/ directory. + Remove the 'blib' directory (it contains the precompiled binaries) + perl Makefile.PL [either at toplevel or in subdirs] + $MAKE [either at toplevel or in subdirs] + $MAKE test [optional, some interactive tests] + $MAKE install [either at toplevel or in subdirs] $MAKE above stands for either "dmake" or "nmake" depending on your available compiler, and perl configuration. WHAT THEN --------- A brief statment of intent: I am doing this to ease the transition for many people who may wish to start using the latest perl on win32 platforms. Long term development of these modules remains the responsibility of the respective authors. I wish to thank the authors of these modules for their effort in making them useful, and for making them freely available. If you find any problems with these modules, kindly report them to me. While I have fixed many problems in these modules, I may also have introduced brand new bugs in the process :) Suggestions, patches, testsuite additions, wholesale rewrites and additional ports of modules welcome. Enjoy! Gurusamy Sarathy gsar@umich.edu 6 February 1998 WHATEVER -------- Copyright for many of the modules is held by their respective authors. Look in the module subdirectories for any conditions of use. The following copyright applies to all files that don't have an explicit copyright statement: (c) 1995 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed by ActiveWare Internet Corp., http://www.ActiveWare.com Other modifications (c) 1997 by Gurusamy Sarathy You may distribute under the terms of either the GNU General Public License or the Artistic License, as specified in the README file of the Perl distribution.