NAME

Install - Build and install wxPerl

wxPerl installation

************************************************************************
You need to install wxWidgets 2.5.3 or later before you can compile wxPerl.
For UNIX systems look at the section "INSTALL wxWidgets"; for Win32
systems, detailed build instructions for wxWidgets + wxPerl are included
in the section "COMPILING UNDER WIN32"; for Mac OS X, refer to
"INSTALL wxWidgets", and then to "USING wxPerl on MAC OS X"
************************************************************************

Quick installation

This applies to UN*X systems, and only if wxWidgets 2.5.3 or later is already compiled and installed.

# unpack the wxPerl archive
tar xzvf Wx-0.xx.tar.gz
cd Wx-0.xx
perl Makefile.PL   # (1)
make               # (2)
make test          # (3)
make install       # (4)

1) see below for a way to specify a different installation directory

2) under Windows you may need to use nmake, or another *make

3) you may also want to do

perl run minimal
perl run controls
...

against the samples in the 'samples' subdirectory, and

perl demo/demo.pl

before installing

4) you may need Administrator/root privileges to install

Additional flags to Makefile.PL

In addition to ExtUtils::MakeMaker flags wxPerl Makefile.PL accepts

--debug

Currently only under Win32 or GCC adds debugging information to the library

--extra-libs={extra libraries}

Adds extra libraries to the link command line

--extra-cflags={extra compiler flags}

Adds extra compiler flags to compiler line

--help

Show the full list of options

Installing wxWidgets (on UNIX systems and Mac OS X)

wxWidgets 2.5.3 or later is required for wxPerl to work.

For UNIX systems only. If you are using prepackaged wxWidgets binaries you need to install the -dev and -contrib-dev packages in order to compile wxPerl, otherwise you just need the main package and the -contrib package. If you are compiling wxWidgets yourself, the quick way is:

./configure
make
make install
cd contrib/src/stc
make
make install

If something goes wrong, please refer to the wxWidgets installation instructions.

Installing under Win32

This wxPerl version was tested with MinGW 3.0 and MS Visual C++ 5. Older MinGW versions (from 1.1 onwards) and newer versions will likely work. For the remainder of this section I'll assume that your Perl is installed in C:\Perl

MS Visual C++ 5 (wxWidgets 2.5.x), MS Visual C++ 6 SP4 (wxWidgets 2.5.x)

wxWidgets 2.5.3 or later is required for wxPerl to work.

Build wxWidgets as a dll

cd z:\path\to\wx\build\msw
nmake -f makefile.vc SHARED=1 BUILD=release
cd ..\..\contrib\build\stc
nmake -f makefile.vc SHARED=1 BUILD=release

# build wxPerl
set WXDIR=z:\path\to\wx
set WXWIN=z:\path\to\wx

perl Makefile.PL
nmake
nmake test
nmake install

To build a debugging wxPerl, follow the instructions above passing BUILD=debug DEBUG_RUNTIME_LIBS=0 to wxWidgets makefile and --debug to Makefile.PL.

MinGW 1.1 or later (wxWidgets 2.5.x)

wxWidgets 2.5.3 or later is required for wxPerl to work.

Get MinGW from http://www.mingw.org/ ; choose the all-in-one package (downloading the individual packages will work but requires you knowing how to install them). MSYS is not required.

If you want to compile wxPerl against ActivePerl using MinGW, you ned to first download and install ExtUtils::FakeConfig from http://wxperl.sourceforge.net/ap_mingw/ ; then just replace the "perl Makefile.PL" with "perl -MConfig_m Makefile.PL". If you built Perl from sources, you don't need this additional step.

Build wxWidgets as a dll

cd z:\path\to\wx\build\msw
make -f makefile.gcc SHARED=1 BUILD=release
cd ..\..\contrib\src\stc
make -f makefile.gcc SHARED=1 BUILD=release

# now build wxPerl
# get dmake from http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/GSAR/dmake-4.1pl1-win32.zip
set WXDIR=z:\path\to\wx
set WXWIN=z:\path\to\wx

perl Makefile.PL
dmake
dmake test
dmake install

To build a debugging wxPerl, follow the instructions above passing BUILD=debug to wxWidgets makefile and --debug to Makefile.PL.

Specifying the installation path

If you don't want to install wxPerl as a system module, you must specify a different installation path. With recent ExtUtils::MakeMaker you can do this by using

perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=path

On older ExtUtils::MakeMaker version the correct incantation might be different.

Using wxPerl on Mac OS X

The 'perl' executable shipped with your OS can't be used to run executables that interact with the GUI, hence you need to use the special 'wxPerl' executable created by wxPerl.

FAQ

Problems compiling XRC and/or STC

Usually they start like this:

STC.c:33:24: wx/stc/stc.h: No such file or directory

and go ahead with many compilation errors. This usually means you did not install wxWidgets' 'contrib' libraries; either install them or disable STC/XRC passing --disable-stc --disable-xrc to Makefile.PL.

C++ compiler

wxPerl needs a C++ compiler to build. By default it will use the C++ compiler that was used to compile wxWidgets; this can cause problems if Perl was compiled with a C compiler of a different brand. For example if you compile Perl with GCC and wxWidgets with ICC or Perl with Sun C compiler and wxWidgets with G++ you will most likely not be able to compile wxPerl. Exceptions are: under Windows you can use ActivePerl (compiled with MS Visual Studio) and wxWidgets compiled with MinGW by using ExtUtils::FakeConfig, under Solaris a similar tool exists for Sun C Compiler -> GCC/G++ compilation.