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).
+
+ 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.
+
+ sh exists no sh
+
+ cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): okay[1] fails[2]
+ 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: okay[1] fails[2]
+ cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: okay fails[2]
+ cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: couldn't build make[3]
+
+ 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; maybe 2.95.x update to
+ cygwin provides this?
+ [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
+
+* Configuring
Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
nt subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
simply change to the nt subdirectory and run `configure' with no
options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
-Building:
+ N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
+ is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
+ surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
+
+* 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.