[originally sent to perlbug@perl.org: user "perlspinr"] [re-sent via stupid ISP's Webmail interface to p5p] Greeting P5P / Perl5 Maintainers, I read the P5P Mailing List via Gmane, but I am at a different account (and a Windoze system, bleah) at this time, so I am filing this report "manually" using Webmail from an ISP. We'll see how it turns out; I will do my best. I've been going over the file that is crucial for people trying to build perl on a Windows OS, namely "{source-kit-root}/win32/makefile.mk". That file is supposed to be for the dmake tool to be able to compile Perl using mingw-gcc, borland-bcc or msvc-cl.exe. In that file are many dmake conditional makefile statements of the syntax: .IF "$(CCTYPE)" == "BORLAND" CC = bcc32 .IF "$(BCCOLD)" != "define" LINK32 = ilink32 .ELSE LINK32 = tlink32 .ENDIF [...] .ENDIF There are some statements that may not be properly terminated; they have paired with the .IF conditional, an ".END" (rather than ".ENDIF"). I do not know if this is acceptable dmake syntax -- I do not even know where one can find out what dmake syntax is. I hate dmake (see reasons below). But IMO unless this is some deliberate variation in syntax intended to accomplish a specific operation in the makefile.mk, I feel that these .END lines are errata that ought to be corrected. Even if they parse as acceptable conditional-block-terminators the inconsistency with the rest of the makefile's syntax is not desirable from a maintainability standpoint. As the attached patch shows, the entries I question are at lines 390, 394, 403. BTW, the reason I am perusing that makefile.mk so carefully is that I am going to create a GNU-make (the standard, freely available, maintained, documented, cross-platform, full-featured 'make' utility) -compliant Makefile to replace the 'dmake'-makefile.mk in the Perl distribution. Thanks for your attention. Soren Andersen