Building and Installing Emacs
- on Windows NT and Windows 95/98/2000
+ on Windows NT/2000 and Windows 95/98/ME
+
+ Copyright (c) 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+ See the end of the file for copying permissions.
+
+ If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to
+ remove the files and unpack again with a different program!
+ WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems,
+ such as converting files to DOS CR-LF format, not creating empty
+ directories, etc. We suggest to use djtarnt.exe from the GNU FTP
+ site.
To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0 or
- later, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later with Mingw and W32 API
- support and a port of GNU make. You can use the Cygwin ports of GCC,
- but Emacs requires the Mingw headers and libraries to build.
+ later and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later with Mingw
+ and W32 API support and a port of GNU make. You can use the Cygwin
+ ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the Mingw headers and libraries to
+ build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least since v1.3.3,
+ include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral part).
+
+ Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
+ tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
+ Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
+ you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
+ like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
+ in the previous paragraph.
+
+ If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2000 or
+ Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash.
Please see http://www.mingw.org for pointers to GCC/Mingw binaries.
-Configuring:
+ For reference, here is a list of which builds of GNU make are known
+ to work or not, and whether they work in the presence and/or absence
+ of sh.exe, the Cygwin port of Bash. Note that any version of make
+ that is compiled with Cygwin will only work with Cygwin tools, due to
+ the use of cygwin style paths. This means Cygwin make is unsuitable
+ for building parts of Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and
+ "make bootstrap", for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section
+ below if you decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
+
+ In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
+ at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use cmd.exe, the default NT shell,
+ instead.
+
+ sh exists no sh
+
+ cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
+ MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
+ MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
+ MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
+ mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
+ cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
+ cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
+ cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
+ mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
+
+ Notes:
+
+ [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
+ emacs source with text!=binary.
+ [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
+ [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
+ versions of cygwin.
+ [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
+ [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
+ May work if building emacs without leim.
+
+* Configuring
Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
nt subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
-Building:
+* Optional image library support
+
+ To build Emacs with support for PNG images, the libpng and zlib
+ headers must be in the include path when the configure script is
+ run. This can be setup using environment variables, or by
+ specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line to
+ configure.bat. Similarly, the jpeg-6b, libXpm, tiff and libungif
+ headers need to be in the include path for support for those image
+ formats to work. The configure script will report whether it was
+ able to detect the headers.
+
+ To use the PNG support, zlib.dll (or zlibd.dll) and libpng.dll (or
+ libpng13.dll, or libpng13d.dll) must be on the PATH or in the same
+ directory as emacs.exe when Emacs is started. Similar instructions
+ apply for other image libraries. Note that tiff support depends on
+ the jpeg library. If you did not compile the libraries yourself, you
+ must make sure that the jpeg library you install is the same one
+ that the tiff library was compiled against.
+
+* Building
After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
until then we will just live with them.
-Installing:
+* Installing
- To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `make install'.
+ To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
+ or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
+ do you have.
By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
built, but a different location can be specified either using the
make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
+ (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
+
The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
-Trouble-shooting:
+* Trouble-shooting
The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old Mingw or W32 API
addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least
1999-11-18 onwards are okay.
-Debugging:
+ If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
+ Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
+ build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
+ for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
+
+ If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
+ 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
+
+ configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
+ --ldflags -mwin32
+
+ However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
+ switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
+
+ We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
+ release.
+
+* Debugging
You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
threads.
+
+COPYING PERMISSIONS
+
+ Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
+ of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
+ copyright notice and permission notice are preserved,
+ and that the distributor grants the recipient permission
+ for further redistribution as permitted by this notice.
+
+ Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
+ of this document, or of portions of it,
+ under the above conditions, provided also that they
+ carry prominent notices stating who last changed them,
+ and that any new or changed statements about the activities
+ of the Free Software Foundation are approved by the Foundation.