Building and Installing Emacs on Windows
(from 95 to 7 and beyond)
- Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+ Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
See the end of the file for license conditions.
* For the impatient
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.
+ site. For modern formats, such as .tar.xz, we suggest bsdtar.exe
+ from the libarchive package; its precompiled Windows binaries are
+ available from this site:
+
+ http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/
- In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.BZR in the
- parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of
- "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not
- yet exist.
+ In addition to this file, if you build a development snapshot, you
+ should also read INSTALL.BZR in the parent directory.
* Supported development environments
To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0, or
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
+ and Windows 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).
You can get pre-built binaries (including any required DLL and the
header files) at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/.
+* Optional libxml2 support
+
+ If configure.bat finds the libxml/HTMLparser.h file in the include path,
+ Emacs is built with libxml2 support by default; to avoid that you can
+ pass the argument --without-libxml2.
+
+ In order to support libxml2 at runtime, a libxml2-enabled Emacs must
+ be able to find the relevant DLLs during startup; failure to do so
+ is not an error, but libxml2 features won't be available to the
+ running session.
+
+ One place where you can get pre-built Windows binaries of libxml2
+ (including any required DLL and the header files) is here:
+
+ http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/
+
+ To compile Emacs with libxml2 from that site, you will need to pass
+ the "--cflags -I/path/to/include/libxml2" option to configure.bat,
+ because libxml2 header files are installed in the include/libxml2
+ subdirectory of the directory where you unzip the binary
+ distribution. Other binary distributions might use other
+ directories, although include/libxml2 is the canonical place where
+ libxml2 headers are installed on Posix platforms.
+
+ You will also need to install the libiconv "development" tarball,
+ because the libiconv headers need to be available to the compiler
+ when you compile with libxml2 support. A MinGW port of libiconv can
+ be found on the MinGW site:
+
+ http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MinGW/Base/libiconv/
+
+ You need the libiconv-X.Y.Z-N-mingw32-dev.tar.lzma tarball from that
+ site.
+
* Experimental SVG support
SVG support is currently experimental, and not built by default.
* 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
+ Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or Windows API
headers. Additionally, Cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c.
- Older versions of the W32 API headers that come with Cygwin and MinGW
+ Older versions of the Windows API headers that come with Cygwin and MinGW
may be missing some definitions required by Emacs, or broken in other
ways. In particular, uniscribe APIs were added to MinGW CVS only on
2006-03-26, so releases from before then cannot be used.