Building biblatex-biber on Windows

I’ve just reinstalled my Strawberry Perl system on Windows, and so had the opportunity to try a clean build of biblatex-biber. I’ve posted before about building this on various platforms, and it now is almost as straight-forward on Windows as on Linux.

As before, I’ll assume you’ve grabbed the source code, unzipped it and have a Command Prompt running as the Administrator, in the directory where biblatex-biber is unzipped. First, you need to install one support Perl module using

cpan Config::AutoConf

You can then do

perl Build.PL
build installdeps
build
build test
build install

That’s it! I’m not quite sure why you have to install Config::AutoConf ‘by hand’, but if you don’t then Text::BibTeX still fails to work. However, that is almost as easy as on Linux or MacOS 10.6, so everyone should be able to use biblatex-biber now.