I'm currently pushing through "the grind" for the new Perl::Dist and Strawberry Perl releases, running the build process over and over again, tweaking and bug-fixing as I go. I've burned about 20 hours of CPU in the last week or so.
I'm happy with the binary-installation phase (which sets up gcc and dmake and friends) and the Perl compilation phase (at least for 5.8.8) and I'm now into the "toolchain distributions" phase.
This involves fetching a pre-defined set of distributions and running "perl Makefile.PL; make; make test; make install" on them (without the ability to recursively resolve deps) to get the CPAN toolchain up to scratch.
The 4th phase once this works is the "CPAN module" phase, which uses the upgraded toolchain to install a variety of modules from the CPAN using CPAN.pm and friends.
This is the phase that most people building custom Perl installs (the cat-in-a-box concept for example) will probably want to customize, to install whatever it is they are interested in.
One minor problem when building dists is that the fixed paths and the fact you can't use a distribution (say, Strawberry) to build a new version of that distribution.
To assist with this problem, I'm going to shortly release a "Perl::Dist::Bootstrap" module, and matching .exe installer.
This will be a Strawberry-like distribution, but which will install to an out-of-the-way C:\bootstrap-perl location, and will come with Perl::Dist and all it's dependencies pre-installed.
So the final process for creating a new Vanilla Family distribution becomes:
1. Install Windows 2. Install the Bootstrap Perl executable 3. Check out your distribution module from version control 4. Run perldist My::Distribution to create the Perl distribution
