I'm using perl v5.8.7 built for cygwin-thread-multi-64int
Not ActivePerl.

The initial problem was that Cygwin had made my home directory be under "Documents and Settings". The accursed spaces in the directory name made CPAN fail.

I changed HOMEPATH to /home/goetzp .
Now I am getting a much wider variety of errors from CPAN, but it still isn't installing most things correctly. It did install HTML::Template . However, it doesn't find Makefile.PL files even when they exist, and gives messages like this:

Untarred /home/goetzp/.cpan/sources/authors/id/D/DS/DSKOLL/MIME-tools-5.420.tar
successfully
Package seems to come without Makefile.PL.
(The test -f "/home/goetzp/.cpan/build/DSKOLL003/Makefile.PL" returned false.)

Writing one on our own (setting NAME to MIMEParser)


cpan> o conf
CPAN::Config options from /usr/lib/perl5/5.8/CPAN/Config.pm:
       commit Commit changes to disk
       defaults Reload defaults from disk
       init Interactive setting of all options

       build_cache 10
       build_dir /home/goetzp/.cpan/build
       cache_metadata 1
       cpan_home /home/goetzp/.cpan
       ftp
       ftp_proxy
       getcwd cwd
       gpg
       gzip /usr/bin/gzip
       histfile /home/goetzp/.cpan/histfile
       histsize 100
       http_proxy
       inactivity_timeout 0
       index_expire 1
       inhibit_startup_message 0
       keep_source_where /home/goetzp/.cpan/sources
       lynx
       make /usr/bin/make
       make_arg
       make_install_arg
       makepl_arg
       ncftp
       ncftpget
       no_proxy
       pager /usr/bin/less
       prerequisites_policy ask
       scan_cache atstart
       shell
       tar /usr/bin/tar
       term_is_latin 1
       unzip
       urllist
       wget /usr/bin/wget