How to simplify cygwin+perl application deployment

["Hsu, Yung-Kao (Yung)" <ykhsu at lucent dot com>]

I started to learn cygwin a few days ago in hope of finding an easy way to port a UNIX (ksh+perl) application to Windows 2000. 

At first glance, it seemed pretty easy to get both cygwin and ActivePerl work together. After running into an integration problem (using #! to specify perl interpreter) this morning, I realized it is problematic in the long run. The safe solution is to simply drop ActivePerl and use the perl packaged under cygwin. Well I ended up spending the rest of the day downloading compilers and building quite a few CPAN modules; Expat & XML::Parser alone costed me a few hours after some patches :-( 
 
Now that I think this will work, there is a problem. The idea of using both cygwin and activePerl to port our application was to simplify its deployment. Since both have simple interface for their installation, all we have to do is to unpack our perl and shell script into their rightful locations. However, without ActivePerl, we now have to compile/build modules. In addition to being tedious, I really don't think our customers need a gcc compiler in their laptop:-) 
 
My question is whether it is possible to archive one such installation and unpack it in another machine? If so, what are the issues that we need to be aware of? Thank for any input.

---
Yung-Kao Hsu

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