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