When building libintl-perl under 32 bit versions of MS-DOS, you have several
options, depending on the facilities available on your system, and on the Perl
version you use.

Cygwin Perl
===========

When using the Perl interpreter that ships with cygwin, you are in a pretty
Unix-like environment, and you should be able to build and use libintl-perl
like on ordinary operating system.

ActiveState Perl
================

By default, the XS version of libintl-perl is not built.  You will not win
a lot, by trying to build the XS version, but if you can't help, here are
the instructions that worked on my system.  Your mileage may vary, however.

C Compiler
----------

Windows does not ship with a C compiler.  Since ActiveState Perl is built
with Microsoft Visual C, you probably will not have a choice, and have to
purchase MSVC.

Building libiconv and GNU gettext
---------------------------------

The XS version of libintl-perl requires the runtime facilities provided by
GNU gettext, which in turn rely on libiconv.  You can both in source form
from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu.

First, unpack both the libiconv and gettext sources in a directory of your
choice, open the MS-DOS cripple shell ("cmd.exe"), and cd into the directory
where you have unpacked the libiconv sources.  There read the file 
"README.woe32" or just type

    nmake -f Makefile.msvc MFLAGS=-MD DLL=1 NO_NLS=1
    nmake -f Makefile.msvc MFLAGS=-MD DLL=1 NO_NLS=1 check
    nmake -f Makefile.msvc MFLAGS=-MD DLL=1 NO_NLS=1 install

The second command line will run the test suite (you may omit this step).

Now cd to the directory where you have unpacked the gettext sources, and
read "README.woe32", or just type

    nmake -f Makefile.msvc MFLAGS=-MD DLL=1
    nmake -f Makefile.msvc MFLAGS=-MD DLL=1 check
    nmake -f Makefile.msvc MFLAGS=-MD DLL=1 install
    
You should now go back into the libiconv build directory, and re-build
the package again with native language support:

    nmake -f Makefile.msvc MFLAGS=-MD DLL=1 NO_NLS=1 distclean
    nmake -f Makefile.msvc MFLAGS=-MD DLL=1
    nmake -f Makefile.msvc MFLAGS=-MD DLL=1 check
    nmake -f Makefile.msvc MFLAGS=-MD DLL=1 install

You should now have the gettext and libiconv DLLs installed in "\usr\bin",
and libraries in "\usr\lib".  It should be theoretically possible to build
static versions (instead of DLLs) of both gettext and libiconv, but I
did not manage to do so here.

Build libintl-perl
------------------

The Makefile.PL provided with libintl-perl normally autodetects the presence
of the required gettext shared libraries, but this test (intentionally) fails
under Windows.  You have to bypass the mechanism by saying

    perl Makefile.PL DIR=gettext_xs
    
This should produce an output like this:

    Checking whether we can compile the XS version ... no
    => Cannot build the XS version of libintl-perl (see 'config.log' for
    => details).  This is harmless!
    Writing Makefile Locale::gettext_xs
    Writing Makefile for libintl-perl

Ignore the warning, that the XS version cannot be built.  It will be
built anyhow.

Now do the usual:

    nmake
    nmake test
    nmake install
    
Please run the testsuite!  If it fails, and you cannot sort out the reason,
re-build the module without the XS version.

Distribution
------------

If you want a binary version of libintl-perl, you either have to bundle it
with the DLLs and libraries for GNU gettext and libiconv, or you have to
build and link against static versions of the two libraries (which I didn't
manage to do).  In any case, please take care that your distribution does
not violate the licenses under which GNU gettext, libiconv, and libintl-perl
are provided! Please read the following statement by Bruno Haible,
maintainer of GNU gettext and libiconv:

  Note that DLLs created with MSVC 7.0 cannot be distributed: They depend
  on a closed-source library 'msvcr70.dll' which is not normally part of a
  Woe32 installation, therefore the distribution of such DLLs - with or
  without msvcr70.dll - would be a violation of the LGPL. This problem does
  not occur with MSVC 6.0 and earlier.

Guido Flohr <guido.flohr@cantanea.com>
