I hate having to do this...

but we have a problem with the final release of 5.8.9.2.

This is one of those things that "nobody told me about" until now, and I'm not blaming the person who finally told me.

The question is, which mailing list do I need to monitor so that I hear about breakage like this BEFORE I do a final build?

At any rate, the bug. It turns out that the version of ExtUtils::ParseXS I installed when upgrading the cpan toolchain was broken on pre-5.10.0 versions - which explains why Win32::Process would not build on 5.8.9 (It had been frustrating me for a month - since the buggy version got released to CPAN, it looks like.)

A development version HAS been released that fixes the bug, but no production version yet.

I'm rebuilding 5.8.9.2 with the patch (the new download files will be called "5.8.9.2-1", but will still identify themselves as 5.8.9.2 in perl -V, just with 4 August 2009 build dates.)

If you're using the original 5.8.9.2, do this, and the breakage should be fixed:

C:\> cpan
cpan> look DAGOLDEN/ExtUtils-ParseXS-2.20_03.tar.gz
C:\strawberry\...2.20_03-xxxxxxxx> perl Build.PL --installdirs core
C:\strawberry\...2.20_03-xxxxxxxx> Build && Build test && Build install
C:\strawberry\...2.20_03-xxxxxxxx> exit
...
cpan> exit

(bold-italic text is what is typed, other text is where you type it at.)

You may wish to install IPC::System::Simple before you exit the CPAN prompt. That'll serve two purposes: 1) It tests that Win32::Process will indeed build with the fix installed (because ISS depends on Win32::Process) and 2) It allows system() to be autodie'd - which I couldn't include in 5.8.9.2 due to this problem.