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1 Building and Installing Emacs
2 on Windows NT/2K/XP and Windows 95/98/ME
3
4 Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006
5 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
6 See the end of the file for copying permissions.
7
8 * For the impatient
9
10 Here are the concise instructions for configuring and building the
11 native Win32 binary of Emacs on Windows, for those who want to skip
12 the complex explanations and ``just do it'':
13
14 1. Change to the `nt' directory (the directory of this file):
15
16 cd nt
17
18 2. Run configure.bat. From the COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE command prompt:
19
20 configure
21
22 from a Unixy shell prompt:
23
24 cmd /c configure.bat
25 or
26 command.com /c configure.bat
27
28 3. Run the Make utility suitable for your environment. If you build
29 with the Microsoft's Visual C compiler:
30
31 nmake
32
33 For the development environments based on GNU GCC (MinGW, MSYS,
34 Cygwin - but see notes about Cygwin make below), depending on how
35 Make is called, it could be:
36
37 make
38 or
39 mingw32-make
40 or
41 gnumake
42 or
43 gmake
44
45 (If you are building from CVS, say "make bootstrap" or "nmake
46 bootstrap" instead and avoid using Cygwin make.)
47
48 4. Generate the Info manuals (only if you are building out of CVS, and
49 if you have makeinfo.exe installed):
50
51 make info
52
53 (change "make" to "nmake" if you use MSVC).
54
55 5. Install the produced binaries:
56
57 make install
58
59 That's it!
60
61 If these short instructions somehow fail, read the rest of this
62 file.
63
64 * Preliminaries
65
66 If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to
67 remove the files and unpack again with a different program!
68 WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems,
69 such as converting files to DOS CR-LF format, not creating empty
70 directories, etc. We suggest to use djtarnt.exe from the GNU FTP
71 site.
72
73 If you are building out of CVS, then some files in this directory
74 (.bat files, nmake.defs and makefile.w32-in) may need the line-ends
75 fixing first. The easiest way to do this and avoid future conflicts
76 is to run the following command in this (emacs/nt) directory:
77
78 cvs update -kb
79
80 Alternatively, use programs that convert end-of-line format, such as
81 dos2unix and unix2dos available from GnuWin32 or dtou and utod from
82 the DJGPP project.
83
84 In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.CVS in the
85 parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of
86 "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not
87 yet exist.
88
89 * Supported development environments
90
91 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0 or
92 later and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later with MinGW
93 and W32 API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use the Cygwin
94 ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and libraries to
95 build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least since v1.3.3,
96 include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral part).
97
98 The rest of this file assumes you have a working development
99 environment. If you just installed such an environment, try
100 building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If
101 it doesn't work, resolve that problem first!
102
103 If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there
104 are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by
105 Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows
106 or sh.exe., a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, here is a list
107 of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether
108 they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port
109 of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin
110 will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of cygwin style
111 paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of
112 Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap",
113 for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you
114 decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
115
116 In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
117 at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default Windows shell,
118 instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have
119 MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe
120 instead of sh.exe.
121
122 sh exists no sh
123
124 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
125 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
126 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
127 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
128 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
129 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
130 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
131 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
132 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
133 mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay unknown[6]
134 mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[7]
135
136 Notes:
137
138 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
139 emacs source with text!=binary.
140 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
141 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
142 versions of cygwin.
143 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
144 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
145 May work if building emacs without leim.
146 [6] please report if you try this combination.
147 [7] tested only on Windows XP.
148
149 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
150 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
151 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
152 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
153 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
154 in the previous paragraph.
155
156 You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These
157 and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several
158 projects:
159
160 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
161 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
162 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
163 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
164
165 If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
166 Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is
167 because the native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the
168 Emacs build procedure tries very hard to support even such limited
169 shells, but as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on
170 Windows 9x, we cannot guarantee that it works without a more
171 powerful shell.
172
173 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
174 found at the Emacs Wiki:
175
176 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
177
178 and at this URL:
179
180 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
181
182 * Configuring
183
184 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
185 `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
186 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
187 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
188 options on the command line when invoking configure.
189
190 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
191 simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no
192 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
193
194 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
195 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
196 surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
197
198 You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details
199 for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure
200 should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section
201 about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the
202 Emacs manual).
203
204 * Optional image library support
205
206 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
207 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is
208 currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for
209 them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the
210 configure script is run. This can be setup using environment
211 variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line
212 to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was
213 able to detect the headers. If the results of this testing appear to be
214 incorrect, please look for details in the file config.log: it will show
215 the failed test programs and compiler error messages that should explain
216 what is wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers
217 are missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
218
219 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
220 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
221 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
222 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
223 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
224 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
225 restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the
226 expected names of the libraries.
227
228 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
229 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
230 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
231 is in the PATH or otherwise accesible and that the binaries are
232 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
233
234 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
235 the GnuWin32 project. These are built with MinGW, but they can be
236 used with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on
237 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html for more details about
238 installing image support libraries.
239
240 * Building
241
242 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
243 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
244 GNU make. (If you are building out of CVS, say "make bootstrap" or
245 "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
246
247 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
248 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
249 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
250 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
251 until then we will just live with them.
252
253 If you are building from CVS, the following commands will produce
254 the Info manuals (which are not part of the CVS repository):
255
256 make info
257 or
258 nmake info
259
260 Note that you will need makeinfo.exe (from the GNU Texinfo package)
261 in order for this command to succeed.
262
263 * Installing
264
265 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
266 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
267 do you have.
268
269 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
270 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
271 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
272 make, like so:
273
274 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
275
276 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
277
278 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
279 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
280
281 * Trouble-shooting
282
283 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
284 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
285 headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
286 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
287 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
288 cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
289 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
290
291 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
292 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
293 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
294 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
295 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c. The W32 API
296 headers that come with Cygwin b20.1 are incomplete, and do not include
297 some definitions required by addsection.c, for instance. Also, older
298 releases of the W32 API headers from Anders Norlander contain a typo
299 in the definition of IMAGE_FIRST_SECTION in winnt.h, which
300 addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least
301 1999-11-18 onwards are okay.
302
303 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
304 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
305 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
306 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
307 config.log, as bugs.
308
309 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
310 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
311 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
312 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
313
314 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
315 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
316
317 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
318 --ldflags -mwin32
319
320 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
321 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
322
323 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
324 release.
325
326 * Debugging
327
328 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
329 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
330 compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC.
331
332 When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
333 pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
334 Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
335 twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
336 automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
337 attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
338 where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
339 Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
340 only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
341 the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
342 error.
343
344 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
345 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
346 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
347 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
348 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
349 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
350 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
351
352 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
353 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
354 Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
355 readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
356 there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
357 definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
358 the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
359
360 The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
361 via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
362 be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
363 emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
364 should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
365
366 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
367 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch
368 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
369 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
370 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
371 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
372 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
373 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
374 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
375 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
376 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
377 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
378
379 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
380 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
381 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
382 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
383 procedure and try using debug_print again.
384
385 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
386 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
387 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
388 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
389 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
390 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
391 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
392 threads.
393
394 COPYING PERMISSIONS
395
396 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
397 of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
398 copyright notice and permission notice are preserved,
399 and that the distributor grants the recipient permission
400 for further redistribution as permitted by this notice.
401
402 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
403 of this document, or of portions of it,
404 under the above conditions, provided also that they
405 carry prominent notices stating who last changed them,
406 and that any new or changed statements about the activities
407 of the Free Software Foundation are approved by the Foundation.