Or why microsoft does save souls (sometimes)
So I decided to start this very blog.
At the time it meant the following:

• Installed apache on my xp machine to start with
• Got myself greymatter
• Once things started working, I decided to add rss generation

And here the things started to be a bit of an uphill battle.

The gm-rss thingy for greymatter said it needed some perl modules, which I promptly grabbed at cpan. Of course I also grabbed gnumake, so that I could install the modules.
At home I have Active Perl installed, so in an overly happy mood I fired it to create and suddenly make stumbled upon a message:

Makefile:xxx: *** missing separator. Stop.

What the? Short search in google - OK, that’s obvious (that should’ve been obvious I’d say) - gnumake is, well, a make and a gnu one, so this bugger doesn’t like CR LF.
So bang! A short subst in vi and… It didn’t help, still I was getting:

Makefile:xxx: *** missing separator. Stop.

and basically had no ideas nor hints what that could be. I forgot about the whole rss idea altogether for some time.
But then I found the wholly grail, and where? At microsoft! (Well, I found the link somewhere on the net, unfortunately I followed it but didn’t save for the mankind…) Anyway the thing is: Active Perl is an MS Windows animal. And thus the makefile is an MS Windows-ish makefile - gnumake simply can’t stand it.
What you need is a microsoft version of nmake.

Of course that’s not a big thing, it’s a good start nevertheless.