If you HATE Dist::Zilla, fear not, you can pretty easily hack at make pull requests for FFI::TinyCC without installing dzil and pulling down half of CPAN! If you Love Dist::Zilla, or if you work with it anyway, then you know what to do and can skip reading this. You will need to install these CPAN dists to work on this dist: . perl 5.8.1 or better (required for FFI::Platypus) . autodie . Alien::TinyCC . Archive::Ar 2.02 or better . File::chdir . Path::Tiny . FFI::Platypus . FFI::Platypus::Type::StringArray . Test2::API . Test2::Suite (sorry there is no cpanfile) You will also need a shared or dll version of libtcc for your platform. Unfortunately, Alien::TinyCC comes with a static library only on most (all?) Unix platforms. This normally gets built and put in the share directory by Module::Build when you install, but of course since you don't want to run dzil that isn't an option. It is okay, you can build it from the checked out git repository like this: % perl -Iinc -MMy::DLL -e tcc_build Take a look at the share directory you should have a libtcc.so or libtcc.dll now. If you have to switch architectures with the same repository, you can clean up with this incantation: % perl -Iinc -MMy::DLL -e tcc_clean Now that you have the dynamic library that FFI::TinyCC needs, you can run the test suite by using prove and its -l option: % prove -l If you need to run a one-liner or whole program with your checked out git version of FFI::TinyCC, you can set PERL5LIB to the lib directory in this repository and it should just work. If it doesn't, then please let me know. I like to use Dist::Zilla because it saves me time, but I am happy to make an effort to make it easier for you to contribute. Thanks! Graham