Question

I have installed mod_perl on an NT server and happily noticed the performance boost. TWiki turns to be really usable on an old Pentium II. A page retrieval dropped from about 5 seconds to less than a second. So ? Everything is ok... Not really, I have three problems (I should state that I am totally new to the Apache/perl/unix scheme) :

1) The latest mod_perl binaries come with apache 1.3.20 not 1.3.22.

Where can I find mod_perl binaries for 1.3.22 ? It seems that they are closely tied to the Apache binaries. Have somebody succeed in using the mod_perl binaries found on the latest distribution with Apache 1.3.22 ?

2) Some modules, especially the mod_auth_XXX ones, raise warnings at apache startup saying that they are using plain EAPI and that they might crash if I do not recompile them with -DEAPI.

Should I care about these messages ? For the while, authentication works well.

3) The distribution comes with its own perl distribution. This is a problem for register.pm that does not find the Digest::SHA1 module at line 27. see DigestModuleNotFoundInModPerlDistribution for this one.

• TWiki version: 01 sep 2001
• Web server: Apache
• Server OS: Windows
• Web browser:
• Client OS:

-- JeromeBouvattier - 13 Dec 2001

Answer

The simple if unhelpful answer is to download CygWin (a set of Unix-like tools for Windows), which includes the GNU C compiler, and then get the Apache sources including mod_perl and build them for Windows (you may be able to use an Apache binary and just compile mod_perl). This is quite a bit more work but it is guaranteed to work, and it is useful if you later need other modules. I suspect that most Apache modules are not readily available for Windows as binaries, though you may get lucky.

There is a TWiki page on using Apache on Cygwin on Windows.

-- RichardDonkin - 14 Dec 2001

Thank you Richard, I thought to compile Apache and mod_perl myself too. But, since I am not very fluent with C and C tools, I wanted to avoid this. Well, if it's the way to go, I'll do that.

-- JeromeBouvattier - 14 Dec 2001

You may be able to get away with only compiling the mod_perl bit - read up on 'apxs', an Apache tool to do this. Recompiling is probably not too hard, as Apache is a pretty well structured system.

-- RichardDonkin - 16 Dec 2001

The CygWin tools are not required to build Apache/modPerl on Windows. Apache comes with Visual C++ projects for building Apache. So does modPerl-1.26 (at least). However, it is worth downloading CygWin for most of the utilities that Twiki needs to run. (RCS isn't part of the cygwin download and must be downloaded from a gnu repository site. RCS cygwin compiling info is available via the cygwin site (see: contributed software) - a couple of minor changes needs to be made to the config script(s) to get it to compile under cygwin.)

-- DavidLeBlanc - 19 Dec 2001

I already have Cygwin and RCS installed since I run TWiki for a while now.

This may be a silly question, but what do you mean by "compiling under cygwin" ? Does it mean that Cygwin comprises a C compiler that can be used to compile Apache and Apache modules (so I don't have to get a VC++ copy) ? Or "compiling under cygwin" means that the binaries resulting from the compiling will be closely linked to the Cygwin environment on the contrary of "standard" compiling ? Is there some advantages/drawbacks ?

Once again, I am a new comer in the Unix/C/Apache world. And it takes time to get the whole picture. Thanks.

-- JeromeBouvattier - 20 Dec 2001

Yes, CygWin is a complete development environment with C, C++ compilers, assemblers, configuration tools etc. You end up with executables that are linked against the cygwin dll and that is all they need to run - the cygwin environment does not generally need to be installed to actually run the binaries that CygWin creates as long as the cywin dll is available.

There is also an alternative meands of compiling using the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler if that's available to you. This is called "MingW" and can result in faster and smaller executables. I believe it also uses only Microsoft dlls to link against, so the cygwin dll might not be needed. MingW can be downloaded using the CygWin setup.exe tool on the CygWin site.

-- DavidLeBlanc - 28 Dec 2001

Thanks for the infos David.

-- JeromeBouvattier - 29 Dec 2001