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1 Building and Installing Emacs
2 on Windows NT/2K/XP and Windows 95/98/ME
3
4 Copyright (c) 2001,2004,2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5 See the end of the file for copying permissions.
6
7 If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to
8 remove the files and unpack again with a different program!
9 WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems,
10 such as converting files to DOS CR-LF format, not creating empty
11 directories, etc. We suggest to use djtarnt.exe from the GNU FTP
12 site.
13
14 If you are building out of CVS, then some files in this directory
15 (.bat files, nmake.defs and makefile.w32-in) may need the line-ends
16 fixing first. The easiest way to do this and avoid future conflicts
17 is to run the following command in this (emacs/nt) directory:
18 cvs update -kb
19 In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.CVS in the
20 parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of "touch.exe"
21 in your path, and that it will create files that do not yet exist.
22
23 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0 or
24 later and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later with MinGW
25 and W32 API support and a port of GNU make. You can use the Cygwin
26 ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and libraries to
27 build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least since v1.3.3,
28 include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral part).
29
30 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
31 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
32 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
33 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
34 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
35 in the previous paragraph.
36
37 You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These
38 and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several
39 projects:
40
41 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
42 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
43 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
44 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
45
46 If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
47 Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash.
48
49 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
50 found at the Emacs Wiki:
51
52 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
53
54 For reference, here is a list of which builds of GNU make are known
55 to work or not, and whether they work in the presence and/or absence
56 of sh.exe, the Cygwin port of Bash. Note that any version of make
57 that is compiled with Cygwin will only work with Cygwin tools, due to
58 the use of cygwin style paths. This means Cygwin make is unsuitable
59 for building parts of Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and
60 "make bootstrap", for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section
61 below if you decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
62
63 In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
64 at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use cmd.exe, the default NT shell,
65 instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have
66 MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe
67 instead of sh.exe.
68
69 sh exists no sh
70
71 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
72 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
73 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
74 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
75 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
76 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
77 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
78 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
79 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
80
81 Notes:
82
83 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
84 emacs source with text!=binary.
85 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
86 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
87 versions of cygwin.
88 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
89 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
90 May work if building emacs without leim.
91
92 * Configuring
93
94 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
95 nt subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
96 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
97 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
98 options on the command line when invoking configure.
99
100 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
101 simply change to the nt subdirectory and run `configure' with no
102 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
103
104 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
105 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
106 surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
107
108 * Optional image library support
109
110 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
111 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is
112 currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for
113 them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the
114 configure script is run. This can be setup using environment
115 variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line
116 to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was
117 able to detect the headers.
118
119 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
120 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
121 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
122 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
123 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
124 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
125 restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the
126 expected names of the libraries.
127
128 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
129 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
130 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
131 is in the PATH or otherwise accesible and that the binaries are
132 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
133
134 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
135 the GnuWin32 project. These are built with MinGW, but they can be
136 used with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs.
137
138 * Building
139
140 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
141 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
142 GNU make.
143
144 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
145 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
146 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
147 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
148 until then we will just live with them.
149
150 * Installing
151
152 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
153 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
154 do you have.
155
156 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
157 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
158 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
159 make, like so:
160
161 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
162
163 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
164
165 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
166 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
167
168 * Trouble-shooting
169
170 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
171 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
172 headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
173 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
174 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
175 cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
176 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
177
178 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
179 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
180 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
181 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
182 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c. The W32 API
183 headers that come with Cygwin b20.1 are incomplete, and do not include
184 some definitions required by addsection.c, for instance. Also, older
185 releases of the W32 API headers from Anders Norlander contain a typo
186 in the definition of IMAGE_FIRST_SECTION in winnt.h, which
187 addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least
188 1999-11-18 onwards are okay.
189
190 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
191 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
192 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
193 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
194
195 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
196 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
197
198 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
199 --ldflags -mwin32
200
201 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
202 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
203
204 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
205 release.
206
207 * Debugging
208
209 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
210 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
211 compiled with MSVC, or gdb if compiled with gcc.
212
213 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
214 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
215 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
216 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
217 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
218 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
219 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
220
221 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
222 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in the MSVC
223 debugger, Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that
224 prints out a readable representation of a Lisp_Object. (If you are
225 using gdb, there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which
226 provides definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. The
227 following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.) The output
228 from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger via the
229 OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should be
230 displayed in the console window that was opened when the emacs.exe
231 executable was started. The output sent to the debugger should be
232 displayed in its "Debug" output window.
233
234 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
235 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch
236 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
237 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
238 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
239 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
240 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
241 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
242 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
243 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
244 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
245 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
246
247 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
248 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
249 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
250 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
251 procedure and try using debug_print again.
252
253 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
254 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
255 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
256 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
257 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
258 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
259 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
260 threads.
261
262 COPYING PERMISSIONS
263
264 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
265 of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
266 copyright notice and permission notice are preserved,
267 and that the distributor grants the recipient permission
268 for further redistribution as permitted by this notice.
269
270 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
271 of this document, or of portions of it,
272 under the above conditions, provided also that they
273 carry prominent notices stating who last changed them,
274 and that any new or changed statements about the activities
275 of the Free Software Foundation are approved by the Foundation.